Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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 Posted: Fri Nov 03, 2006 1:13 am Post subject: Stardust Closed... |
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I was in a penthouse suite at a private party at MGM when the Sands was imploded. Spectacular view. The Sands was Sammy Davis, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin territory.
Before that, I was living in an apt. several miles away when Treasure Island's pirate capt. symbolically fired the shot that triggered the Dunes's implosion. You could hear the fireworks and the explosion all over the city.
I missed the Landmark going down.
But now this, particularly given the incredible history at the Stardust...What's next? Are they going to replace Caeser's Palace?
Doesn't seem like Vegas anymore.
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LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AP) -- The Stardust, the neon-wrapped casino with a mobbed-up past whose 1,065 rooms once set the standard for size on the Las Vegas Strip, witnessed its last roll of the dice Wednesday.
Wistful longtime employees and loyal gamblers gathered for a last farewell to the iconic 48-year-old institution, which is to be razed early next year to make way for Boyd Gaming Corp.'s planned $4 billion Echelon Place resort.
The Stardust opened July 2, 1958, as the world's largest hotel and catered to middle America with $6-a-night rooms and low-minimum stakes gambling.
But as bigger, classier casinos sprung up around it in the late 1980s and '90s and patrons began shelling out more for rooms, food and drinks, its luster began to fade.
"I'm really going to miss this place," said Jimmy Kunihiro, a 60-year-old Honolulu resident, as he took a last pass at the craps table. "It's a home away from home."
The resort became as famous for its familiar friendliness as its mob connections. In the 1995 movie "Casino," Robert De Niro played a character inspired by the finely tailored Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, who ran the hotel-casino in the mid-1970s... |
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TRAVEL/11/02/stardust.memories.ap/index.html |
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