After 67 years of welcoming guests to the Las Vegas Strip, the historic Tropicana Hotel is no more.

The hotel and casino collapsed to the ground in a planned implosion that included a fireworks display and drones in the early hours of Wednesday morning, destroying the last real mob building on the Strip.

There were no public areas to watch the explosion due to safety risks — Las Vegas police had closed the streets surrounding the hotel — although people in nearby high-rise resorts had a great view of the event.

At approximately 2:30 in the morning, the fireworks display began. Local outlet KTNV reportsAccompanied by 555 drones that flew side by side, they wrote “Tropicana” and “Thank You.”

Minutes later, the implosion occurred and the Tropicana towers fell within just seconds, creating huge clouds. When the dust settled, the building was gone, collapsing with about 2,200 pounds of explosives.

It will be replaced by a $1.5 billion baseball stadium for the Oakland Athletics. The on-site playground and resort will span about nine acres, planned by Bally’s and Gaming and Leisure Properties, according to KTNV.

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The Tropicana’s demolition is the first implosion in nearly a decade for a city that loves new beginnings, which has made casino busts as much a part of its identity as gambling itself.

“What Las Vegas did, in classic Las Vegas style, is they turned many of these internal collapses into spectacles,” said Jeff Schumacher, a historian and vice president of exhibitions and programs at the Mob Museum.

Former casino magnate Steve Wynn changed the way Las Vegas did casinos in 1993 with the collapse of the sand dunes to make way for the Bellagio. Not only did Wynn consider televising the event, he also created a fictional story of the implosion that made it look like pirate ships at his other casino across the street were shooting at the dunes. Since then, there has been a feeling in Las Vegas that devastation of this magnitude was worth seeing, Schumacher said.

The city hasn’t blown up a Strip casino since 2016, when the last tower on the Riviera was razed to expand the convention center.

It was Tropicana The third oldest casino in the sector when it closed in April. It was formerly known as the “Tiffany of the Strip” because of its opulence. She was a frequent haunt of the legendary Rat Pack and made famous by the showgirls of the Folies Bergere.

It was opened in 1957 and consists of three floors and 300 hotel rooms divided into two wings. Over the years, it has undergone major renovations, adding two hotel towers and a $1 million green-and-amber stained glass roof over the casino floor.

However, the Tropicana’s original low-rise hotel suites have survived several renovations, making it the last true mob building on the Strip. Behind the scenes of the casino’s grand opening, the Tropicana had ties to organized crime, largely through notorious gangster Frank Costello.

Costello was shot in the head in New York weeks after Tropicana’s debut. He survived, but the investigation led police to a piece of paper in his coat pocket containing the exact Tropicana winnings number, revealing the mob’s stake in the casino.

By the 1970s, federal authorities investigating Kansas City mobsters had charged more than a dozen agents with conspiring to steal $2 million in gambling revenue from Las Vegas casinos, including the Tropicana. Tropicana-related charges alone resulted in five convictions.

With the Tropicana gone, that leaves the Flamingo as the only remaining casino on the Strip from the mob era. But Schumacher said the original flamingo structures are long gone. The casino was completely rebuilt in the 1990s.

-With files from The Associated Press

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