LAS VEGAS — If ever there’s a sleepy time in Las Vegas, it’s 2:30 a.m. on a Wednesday. This Wednesday, however, thousands gathered in the middle of a midweek night on the south end of the Strip to witness the implosion of the historic Tropicana Las Vegas hotel and casino.

Tearing down casinos is how Vegas molts, and the Tropicana was the first such implosion since 2016. It was the first since drones became standard parts of sky shows, and the first since professional sports became part of any Vegas reinvention equation. This time, the extremely Vegas occasion was to make room for the A’s new baseball stadium as the MLB team moves from Oakland, Calif.

There were no tickets for sale nor public viewing areas set up — “for safety reasons,” according to Bally’s Corp., which organized the whole shebang, in partnership with the A’s.

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But make no mistake, it was a public event. Hours before the detonation blaster was pressed, visitors spilled out of their hotels to find a good place to watch. Crowds gathered on Las Vegas Boulevard sidewalks and pressed against hotel-room windows to see the destruction of the legendary casino-resort property that Bally’s bought two years ago for $308 million.

The spectacle also was viewed on live streams worldwide and local TV news stations.

Mark Stander was hoping to see it from the top of the MGM Grand parking garage. But that wasn’t allowed. Hours before the show, security was clearing away all who had the same idea and was preparing to roll out a huge plastic tarp that covered the garage structure to prevent dust and debris from covering the cars there.

“My wife and I came [to the Tropicana] for our honeymoon.” Stander said. “And we’ve been here since then probably a dozen or 15 times.”

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Stander said he came here with his family from Shingletown, Calif., “just to see this thing implode.” He and his wife watched the Dunes go down more than 30 years ago.

“This one is going to go down fast,” said Sam Habt, a limo driver who planned to watch the implosion from the portico at the MGM Grand. “It is sad to see all the places go. A lot of people have a lot of memories.”

Habt says he witnessed the implosion of the Dunes in 1993 and the Hacienda in 1996.

Implosion as tradition

Las Vegas has been making a show of implosions for decades, when casino mogul Steve Wynn blew up the Dunes in 1993 to make room for the Bellagio. Since then, casino implosions have been a unique Vegas spectacle, with the big question being how it will fall. Will it tip over like the Landmark (1995), or will it drop like a heavy curtain falling off its rod like the New Frontier (2007)?

Stardust — also 2007 — was memorable for how the countdown was displayed on the structure itself, as if the building was celebrating its own demise.

Before the Tropicana, the last Vegas casino to go down was the Riviera in 2016.

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Imploding the two 23-story towers that made up the Tropicana’s hotel and casino took 490 pounds of explosives for the steel-framed Paradise Tower, and 1,700 pounds of explosives for the concrete-framed Club Tower. To light it up and take it down required 22,000 feet of detonating cord.

The event included a seven-minute fireworks show and a 555-drone salute.

“This moment in Las Vegas history represents more than just the next chapter,” Bally’s chairman, Soo Kim, said. “It’s the evolution of the Strip.”

The Tropicana countdown was done with drones between the two towers. The music for the fireworks show was a mix of Frank Sinatra, Elvis and “Take me out to the Ballgame.”

Farewell to a Rat Pack-era hangout

Opened in 1957, the Tropicana was one of the early resorts that helped shape the Las Vegas skyline. The mob-era property underwent its first major expansion with the addition of a 600-room tower in 1979, offering guests previously unseen views of the Strip.

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This expansion was part of a broader trend during this era, as Las Vegas resorts began to grow vertically to accommodate the increasing number of visitors. Its second tower would open in 1986.

From its earliest days, the Tropicana was known for its legendary entertainment. A favorite destination of the Rat Pack, the Trop hosted shows featuring Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Gladys Knight and quintessential Vegas acts like Siegfried & Roy and Wayne Newton.

Folies Bergère, a Paris-style revue that helped set the standard for bedazzled (and topless) Vegas entertainment, ran for nearly 50 years at the Tropicana.

Elvis Presley filmed a scene from “Viva Las Vegas” there. Sammy Davis Jr. owned an 8 percent interest in the Tropicana in the early 1970s, making him the first Black person with an ownership stake in a major Strip hotel.

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“It is goodbye to old Las Vegas and the Rat Pack,” Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) said Tuesday at the Global Gaming Expo. “You’ve got a generation of people now who don’t even know who that was. The old glamour may be gone, but the new glamour is coming. It’s high-tech and involves sports.”

After the implosion, a cloud of dust would blow across the media and VIP viewing area. Cars and cameras were quickly coated. People brought out their old KN95 masks.

The implosion should finally put to rest any speculation that financing snags for the A’s owner, John Fisher, had the team looking for another location to build its new $1.5 billion ballpark. Construction is expected to begin this spring.

Bally’s and A’s logos were all over everything at the implosion — in lights on the side of each tower, in the sky formed by drones, and on banners at a VIP watch party.

“There was never any doubt,” Kim insisted.

Dan Michalski is a freelance reporter based in Las Vegas.