Tuesday, March 13, 2007 | 11:06 a.m.
The once-glitzy casino on the Las Vegas Strip known for its bargain rooms, friendly service and mobbed-up past was imploded early Tuesday in a hail of fireworks to pave the way for Boyd Gaming Corp.'s $4.4 billion megaresort complex, Echelon.
Hundreds of guests partied beneath tents and on makeshift patios before Boyd chairman Bill Boyd's four grandsons pushed a plunger, setting off a pyrotechnics display and detonation that generated a massive dust cloud, chasing revelers into cars, buses and nearby casinos.
"It hurts. We cried," said Sheila Navarro, 51, a school supplies buyer from Oxnard, Calif., who took shelter in the nearby Frontier casino-hotel. She came with three sisters, her mother, an aunt and a brother-in-law to say a final farewell to the casino she's gambled at for more than 30 years.
"It's very hard for me to find another casino to go to," she said. "Maybe in two years, three years, I'll have different feelings, but right now, my heart is broken."
The property opened July 2, 1958, billing itself as the world's largest resort hotel with 1,032 rooms. It is credited with being Las Vegas' first mass-market casino, thanks to cheap rates and loss-leading food and drinks.
Bob Boughner, Echelon Resorts' chief executive, said while the Stardust was a favorite of the nostalgia crowd, it was missing out on younger patrons and those who come to Las Vegas for conventions.
"The Stardust almost passed a generation and it's very important for us to be forward looking not only in terms of satisfying our customers but our shareholders as well," he said. "Echelon will offer our customers an upscale product."
For many, the Stardust represented the most accessible place to stay in a city that gives VIP treatment to the biggest gamblers. But the concept of discounting rates to keep people coming is rapidly fading from the Las Vegas Strip as many casinos nowadays make more revenue from hotel rooms, clubs, shows and cuisine than they do from gambling.
"There was this implicit idea that invisible high rollers came in and funded everything, so that Mr. and Mrs. America could have a steak for $2 and see Frank Sinatra for the price of a drink," said David Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
"Now you can build a 7,000-room hotel and charge $300 a night for rooms," he said. "With slots being so big, it is all the people losing $200 per trip that are driving the growth."
The implosion turned a 32-story tower, gutted to its barest concrete and steel over the past three months, into the tallest building ever felled on the Strip.
LVI Services Inc. used 428 pounds of explosives to destroy the casino's two towers. Twenty water cannons sprayed the cloud, which still blanketed the area in grey dust, and the main drag of the 24-hour gambling mecca 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.
In the next two decades, the property's luster began to fade. "Lido de Paris," the showgirl extravaganza that starred illusionists Siegfried and Roy for more than a decade, wrapped up in 1991 after a 32-year run.
Wayne Newton, the "Danke Schoen" crooner, brought nostalgia back to the aging clientele in 2000 but called it a wrap in April 2005.
And in each of last year's three quarters before its official closure Nov. 1, the Stardust made less money than the previous year.
In its place, Boyd plans to build a new resort, Echelon, 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.
Upscale hotel brands at Echelon will include the Shangri-La, Delano and Mondrian - meaning that cut-rate rooms will be found increasingly off the Strip, like downtown, said Anthony Curtis, president of the tourist site LasVegasAdvisor.com. For the last few months, Boyd has been directing Stardust regulars to its off-Strip casino, The Orleans.
"From the bargain-seeking aspect of it, every time an old one goes and a new one comes, you kind of go, 'That's not so good.' But there's still a lot of the old stuff in Vegas," Curtis said.
"In my opinion, the new Las Vegas is a better Vegas. These places, they did their job, they lived their lives, and it's time for the next."
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On the Net:
Boyd Gaming Corp.: http://www.boydgaming.com
Stardust: http://www.stardustlv.com
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