Here’s Your Bird’s Eye View of the Tropicana Demolition

By Scott Roeben, on May 28 2024
4 min read 20 comments
Las Vegas

The old girl is slowly fading away. Yes, Tropicana was female. Cancel us if you must, that’s just a fact.

Tropicana closed on April 2, 2024 to make way for an imaginary MLB ballpark. The truth is the plan was always to demolish the Trop, even before the A’s fiasco.

We popped by for a Tropicana demolition update, mainly because there’s a lot of interest in the closure of Tropicana, especially among those who hadn’t visited in 10 years.

Tropicana opened April 4, 1957 and closed April 2, 2024, because Tropicana hates our fellow OCD sufferers.

There’s been a lot of activity around the Tropicana since it closed. Physical assets have been auctioned off and the site has been enclosed by a $500,000 wood construction fence.

The plan is to flatten everything on the site around the hotel towers, then those will be imploded in October 2024.

Here’s a look at the Tropicana in the throes of its erasure from the Las Vegas Strip. We added the wind sound effects to avoid any concerns the video is a deep fake.


The Tropicana site is generating lots of rubble. We would mansplain how building demolition works, but given the fact we know virtually nothing about the subject, we are unable to assist you in that regard.

What we do know is the demolition crew at Tropicana is keeping everything in very neat piles and doing their best to mitigate dust so the surrounding resorts don’t have to wash their Statue of Liberty and bronze lion and castle turrets every other day.

In an effort to make amends with OCD sufferers, demolition crews at Tropicana are sorting the rubble into small, medium and large piles.

What’s next for the Tropicana site?

As mentioned, it’s unlikely to be a ballpark or a casino, at least with the current roster of dopes involved.

The A’s have shown no signs they have financing for a $1.5 billion anything, including a stadium.

The blind belief in the A’s clown show continues unabated, however. That’s probably because the best and brightest in Las Vegas leadership says the A’s absolutely have financing for the project.

Steve Hill, president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “They’re coming and they’ve said they can finance this stadium. They are going to play baseball here in 2028. I frankly think it’s just fun (for critics) to create some drama around it and that’s happening. That keeps all of our lives a little more interesting, but it doesn’t change the facts on the ground, which is they’ve said what they’re going to do and they’re just doing it.”

How can critics like this blog continue to be skeptical when there’s obviously an iron-clad financing plan in place? After all, the A’s have “said they can finance the stadium.” Saying things is doing things! Everyone knows this. In addition to that, there are “facts on the ground.” The facts are, of course, that the A’s have said what they’re going to do. And they’re just doing it.

Hello. Could the A’s plan be any more set in stone or absolutely happening?

This legally protected fair use parody of the Nike swoosh is fashioned from horse manure. Please keep up.

Fun fact: The company handling Tropicana’s demolition is California-based GGG Demolition. The “GGG” in the company’s name stands for “going, going, gone,” a baseball term to describe a home run. Would we know this if we weren’t a noted sports expert?  “Going, going, gone” is also used at cattle auctions. We are also a noted cattle auction expert.

The Trop cost $15 million to build, or about what the owners of the Tropicana site will make each year when it becomes a parking lot.

As for Bally’s Corp.’s plan to build a resort on the Tropicana site? Pretty much ditto. They’ve said they’re doing it, so it must be happening!

A top Bally’s Corp. told the Review-Journal “there’s no urgency in developing plans for a resort attached to a Major League Baseball stadium being built by the Oakland Athletics on the Tropicana site.”

Bally’s has no urgency because there’s no money and no plan, and the company can’t even muster the energy to whip up some sweet A.I. renderings, but everything is moving forward just as Mother Nature intended. Here, we’ll do it.

The more imaginary ballfields the better, we always say.

So, what’s really going to happen at the Tropicana site? The towers get demolished and Las Vegas gets an empty lot for the foreseeable future.

The A’s play in Sacramento for three years and stay there. The Seminoles build the team a stadium and Las Vegas eventually gets a team with serious people at the helm. That team’s ballpark is built in the Rio parking lot.

Just spit-balling here.

Bally’s Corp. bails, and the land owner, Gaming & Leisure Properties, finds a new tenant who can actually develop a new casino resort. The over-under on when a new casino opens is a decade. Market conditions in Las Vegas are such that nobody should be opening a resort, just ask Fontainebleau.

We’ll keep you in the loop on Tropicana’s demolition, of course, and anything related to the yanking of Sin City’s chain by the Sacramento A’s. Stay tuned.

Although, we’re pretty sure “staying tuned” isn’t even a thing anymore.