When Sherry and James Johnson heard that Stardust was about to be demolished, the Salt Lake City couple found out they were in Las Vegas to say goodbye to an old friend.
Fourteen years ago, the couple had their honeymoon in Stardust. Back and forth for about seven years on their anniversary, they went back to their hotel to celebrate the anniversary in the same room at Room 3103.
The Johnson family could see what their favorite room was on a grassy hill in a parking lot north of the New Frontier, and shortly after 2.30am on Tuesday a 32-story shell in a hotel tower was dropped by a 428-pound dynamite.
“I hope this doesn’t mean that our marriage will also collapse,” joked James Johnson, as he waited with friends Amy and Tom Lee and thousands of other tourists and Las Vegas residents until Stardust collapsed.
“We had many good memories in Stardust,” said Sherry Johnson. “It’s kind of sad.” 메이저 토토사이트
Robert Bowner, an executive at Boyd Gaming, had similar feelings. He oversaw the construction of the Stardust Tower, which was part of a $50 million expansion of the strip resort in 1988. It took construction workers 18 months to complete the hotel’s skyscraper and less than 18 seconds for the wreckage to collapse.
Bowner said the company’s management realized the tower would have to be demolished for a $4.4 billion Echelons project planned last year. The Echelons site is 87 acres. Construction is scheduled for mid-June and the project will begin in 2010.
“We tried to preserve this tower and integrate it into the project,” said Bowner. “But in the end, having a clean slate was much more effective for the development of the Eclones.”
Stardust closed in November after 49 years of operation. Three buses of the casino’s former employees, employees and former Stardust VIP customers watched the building collapse in a sealed compound in a New Frontier parking lot.
Following a fireworks display that included nearly 3,000 aerial shells, a 10-second countdown to the explosion lit up the tower’s surface in Stardust using a fireworks display. The explosive then pulled out support columns for both the tower and the smaller nine-story tower, which had hosted guests since 1964. More than 500,000 tons of concrete and steel crashed down.
The demolition blanketed the building with a dense cloud of dust that had moved across the desert, Super Aretic, and crowds in the New Frontier parking lot scrambled to ask for cover.