\nKimberly Pierceall, Associated Press \u00b7 February 10, 2015 at 6:53 am
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\n\tLAS VEGAS (AP) \u2013 With a 4,400-pound explosive punch, a Las Vegas hotel turned into a pile of rubble early Tuesday.<\/p>\n
\tThe 12-story Clarion casino-hotel became the 13th hotel to gain implosion infamy in a town that explodes the old to make way for the new.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cHopefully 13 will be a lucky number,\u201d Lorenzo Doumani, the site\u2019s new owner and developer, said a few hours before he and his family counted down to the Clarion\u2019s final seconds at nearly 3 a.m., flanked by two showgirls and having listened to a pre-implosion soundtrack of Frank Sinatra.<\/p>\n
\tThe 200-room casino-hotel opened in 1970 as the Royal Inn and was called the Debbie Reynolds \u2013 for its one-time owner \u2013 as well as the Greek Isles and the Paddle Wheel.<\/p>\n
\tAmanda Dickerson had never stayed at the Clarion or any of its incarnations, but she reveled in its demise early Tuesday morning after traveling from Ripon, Wisconsin, to check an unlikely item off her life\u2019s bucket list: witness a building implosion in person.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cWe don\u2019t do this in Wisconsin,\u201d she said after the dust had almost settled. \u201cIt was truly amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tDickerson, 35, her boyfriend Pete Kuhn, 38, and Las Vegas local Cherie DeWilde, who first alerted her friend to the impending implosion, had been scoping out the casino-hotel earlier Monday when they got to talking with the construction crew. After telling their tale, the trio earned an exclusive invite to watch the building crumble from across the street alongside the developer, his family, friends and members of the press.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cIt was one of the best experiences of my life,\u201d Dickerson said.<\/p>\n
\tPointing to the leftover rubble, Kuhn joked that it resembled something else.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cThat also looks like our wallet this week,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\tWhat took seconds to destroy required several months of planning and 4,400 pounds of explosives, said Anthony O. Schlecht, safety coordinator for Las Vegas-based Burke Construction who said the preparation extended to covering nearby pools, including at the neighboring Marriott hotel.<\/p>\n
\tIt\u2019s been a while since a casino-hotel was felled by controlled explosives. Between 2004 and 2007, six Vegas properties were brought down, but in the eight years since, the only Strip-side implosions were the segment of the Tropicana and a parking structure.<\/p>\n
\tThe Clarion was no marquee property on the scale of a Stardust, which was imploded eight years ago, or a Dunes, which made way for the Bellagio.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cIt\u2019s a little harder to gin up the same degree of interest,\u201d said University of Nevada, Las Vegas history professor Michael Green of the Clarion\u2019s less noteworthy impending implosion.<\/p>\n
\tDoumani said he knows this isn\u2019t a landmark property.<\/p>\n
\tPerhaps appropriately, Doumani watched the implosion of the casino-hotel he bought last year from a parking lot that paved over the spot where the Landmark casino-hotel once stood, before it was demolished in 1995.<\/p>\n
\tInstead the Clarion, off the Strip across from the area\u2019s convention center, has had several names and had fallen into bankruptcy nearly as many times, he said.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cIt is not a storied site,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\tHe said it was the building itself, and rooms that resembled cubicles, that didn\u2019t work, not the location.<\/p>\n
\tIts proximity both to the Strip and to the convention center appealed to Doumani. His plan \u2013 or hope while he works on financing and waits for nearby development to come to fruition \u2013 is to build a 60-story hotel tower that could be the tallest occupied building in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n
\tThere would be no condos and no casino, he said.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cInstead of trying to compete with everybody, you have to have something unique,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\tAnd that uniqueness could involve catering to convention-goers, including incorporating untraditional office-space to appeal to companies that frequent Las Vegas for conventions.<\/p>\n
\tHe said he hopes to have a plan in place by the end of the year. He doesn\u2019t expect any kind of opening before 2018.<\/p>\n
\tDoumani said he\u2019ll be posting updates to 305CCD.com including video of Tuesday\u2019s implosion.<\/p>\n
Posted by:<\/strong> Dr Crapology on February 11, 2015, 12:31 am<\/p>\n Kimberly Pierceall, Associated Press \u00b7 February 10, 2015 at 6:53 am Bookmark and Share LAS VEGAS (AP) \u2013 With a 4,400-pound explosive punch, a Las Vegas hotel turned into a pile of rubble early Tuesday. The 12-story Clarion casino-hotel became…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-casino-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8644\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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