TROP is dropping soon! Iconic Vegas casino announces closing date
Tropicana Las Vegas announced Monday that it will permanently close on April 2. The striptease icon is just two days away from her 67th birthday.
The announcement was made in an internal memo to employees from Vice President and General Manager Arik Knowles. The memo was shared by trusted X/Twitter account Las Vegas Locally.
"Our anticipated deadline is April 2, 2024," the memo states. "At the same time, we will begin closing all hotel reservations and rescheduling all reservations for April and beyond."
Some had hoped the Athletics' stadium deal would fail and save the resort. However, the memo specifies that the company will "begin preparations for demolition of the Las Vegas Tropicana Hotel and finalize a master plan granting the Athletics approximately nine acres for stadium development."
No specific date has been given for the implosion, but it is expected to occur in the summer.
Architectural giants Gensler and Bjarke Ingels Group/HNTB are reportedly developing competing designs for the stadium, with a winner expected to be chosen soon.
Potential Curveball
News of the closure was almost the opposite of a surprise, as it was announced last May (at least to employees). Even the date is easy to guess, as Tropicana's website has stopped offering pre-orders since April 1.
Last November, the Tropicana quietly closed its oldest hotel room, which also happens to be the oldest remaining room on the Las Vegas Strip.
However, Scott Roeben of his own company, Vital Vegas, posted a surprising theory on Monday morning.
Robben wrote that demolition of the barren casino-hotel has been planned by Bally's for some time and would happen regardless of the A's relocation plans.
In other words, despite approval of $380 million in public funds to build the club and stadium at the Tropicana site - for which the Athletic recently thanked 30 representatives for $87,000 - Auckland FC's move "is still okay" will not happen.
Team A provided no evidence that they had the ability to contribute $1 billion to the project (presumably they were trying to find investors to buy a minority stake in the team, and were therefore not recipients), and there was no evidence that Bally's company "had the resources to realize their ambitious plans," Robben speculated, putting the chances of the team moving to Vegas at 60/40.
Last Wednesday, at a Chamber of Commerce event in Las Vegas, about 100 spectators who paid $125 a ticket refused to applaud A's owner John Fisher or his ball club, which plays in the U.S. Pro League Major League Baseball (MLB) has the worst record in 2023 with a record of 50 wins and 112 losses.
Tropical 101
The Trop Hotel was designed by hotelier Ben Jaffe, a partner in the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. In 1955, he purchased 40 acres at the intersection of Highway 91 and Bond Road, just south of the Flamingo Hotel. He longed to own the best resort in Las Vegas but didn't want to build or operate it, so he leased the property to a company called Hotel Conquistador Inc., which had extensive experience in both areas.
The problem is that the experience is that of organized crime. The Conquistador Hotel was owned by Phil Kastel, who ran illegal bev's around New Orleans under Luciano's crime boss Frank Costello. Beverly Club Casino. The pair also ran a sizeable illegal pokies circuit.
Trop's operators have removed Kastel's name from the gaming license application ahead of a final hearing before the Gaming Control Board. But only a month after the premiere, Costello suffered an assassination in New York at the behest of rival crime boss Vito Genovese. Police found a Tropicana promissory note with a gross profit of $651,284 in one of the gangster's coat pockets.
oops!
However, national crime headlines haven't hurt business. They may even have added to the Tropp plot. When it opened, it was the most expensive casino ever built in Las Vegas. The $15 million price tag was far more than the $8.5 million it took to complete the Riviera two years ago, even though it had 300 rooms and was only one-third the size of the Stardust Hotel, which opened the following year. "Luxurious, tasteful, warm, intimate and functionally efficient" is how it was first described by the Las Vegas Sun.
The casino resort was popular, with stars such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor visiting, including Jayne Mansfield and Taylor's fiancée Eddie Fisher.
Tropp eventually earned the nickname "Tiffany on the Las Vegas Strip."
Mistake
By the early 1970s, Tiffany was tempted by new, larger competitors, including Caesars Palace and International Hotels (the Las Vegas Hilton). Mitzi Stauffer Briggs, heir to Stauffer Chemical, bought the resort in 1975 with the intention of competing with him. In 1977, she demolished the Tropicana's original casino and began construction of the 22-story Tiffany Tower. A year later, a record-skimming operation run by the Civella crime family in Kansas City was revealed. The criminal gang was part of the plot of the hit 1995 film Casino, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone.
Because of its Mafia connections, Briggs was forced to sell the Trop Hotel to its first business owner, Ramada, who added a second tower (the island) in 1986. However, the Trop Hotel's reputation never recovered, experiencing a revolving door of financially strapped new owners who promised renovations that never materialized. In 2015, Penn National Gaming (later Penn Entertainment) acquired Trop for $360 million. The company sold the land it occupied to a spin-off company, Gaming and Leisure Properties (GLPI), during the COVID-19 pandemic. In September 2022, Bally's Corporation purchased Tropicana's non-land assets from GLPI for $148 million and leased the land to GLPI for an annual lease of $10.5 million.
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Source: www.casino.org
