Stardust Casino turns to Dust
The Las Vegas Strip’s first mass-market casino-hotel was imploded early Tuesday in a hail of fireworks to make way for Boyd Gaming Corp.’s $4.4 billion megaresort.
The casino opened July 2, 1958, billing itself as the world’s largest resort hotel with 1,032 rooms. It was credited with being Las Vegas’ first mass-market casino, thanks to cheap rates and loss-leading food and drinks.
Hundreds of people partied beneath tents and on makeshift patios before Boyd chairman Bill Boyd’s four grandsons pushed a plunger to detonate the former Stardust casino. The blast generated a massive dust cloud that chased the on lookers into cars, buses and nearby casinos.The implosion turned a 32-story tower, gutted to its barest concrete and steel over the past three months, into the tallest building ever knocked down on the Strip.
428 pounds of explosives where used to destroy the casino’s two towers. Twenty water cannons sprayed the dust cloud, which blanketed the area in gray ash, and the main drag of the 24-hour gambling area was temporarily shut down.
The clean up of the site was expected to take up to two months.
The Stardust became as famous for its stellar, 188-foot sign and marquee as its mob connections. The Strip institution was the inspiration for the 1995 movie “Casino,” in which Robert De Niro played a character inspired by Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, who ran the casino-hotel in the mid-1970s.
But as regulators cracked down on skimming in later years, Boyd was brought in as an operator in 1983 and bought the Stardust in 1985 when the owners lost their gambling license.
The new mega casino is set to open in late 2010 with more than 5,000 hotel rooms, a production theater, concert venue, shopping mall and more than 1 million square feet of meeting space.