Tropicana Las Vegas hotel closes its doors for MLB ballpark
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The Tropicana hotel and casino in Las Vegas closed up shop on Tuesday, as developers plan to turn the storied resort into an MLB ballpark.
Employees and managers shut the doors around 1 p.m. local time as the final guests checked out, local Fox affiliate KVVU reported. The casino floor closed at 3 a.m. Tuesday.
Californian Will Ross was the last person to cash out, according to local CBS affiliate KLAS.
“It’s only $4,” he told the outlet. “I might actually frame it and hang it up on the wall.”
The Tropicana was the third oldest still-operating casino on the Strip, only behind the Flamingo and the Sahara. But its fate had been sealed since May 2023, when its owners at Bally’s Corporation reached a deal with the Oakland A’s to build a ballpark on the site.
The Tropicana opened on April 4, 1957, and was billed as the nicest casino on the Las Vegas Strip at the time. In the 1971 James Bond film “Diamonds Are Forever,” it got a shoutout from 007 as “quite comfortable.”
The casino was also notorious for its connections to the mob. When mobster Frank Costello was being treated for a gunshot wound in New York just weeks after the hotel opened, police found a piece of paper with the casino’s exact earnings in a pocket. The handwritten note listed “money to be skimmed” for Costello and his associates, according to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas.
In its heyday, the Tropicana also hosted A-listers such as Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Sammy Davis Jr. Its star-studded residencies included Gladys Knight and Wayne Newton.
But as the Strip became populated by even fancier mega-resorts, such as Caesars Palace, the Tropicana slowly fell down the pecking order. The hotel went through several rebrands and ownership changes in the ensuing decades before Bally’s struck the deal with the A’s.
Demolition is scheduled for October.
