Sands Hotel Demolition
With a recording of Frank Sinatra singing “Bye, Bye, Baby” blaring in the background, the Sands Hotel demolition last October was a dramatic example of implosion. The story behind the event reveals much about the reasons we tear down buildings today.
The Sands Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey was a 21 story, 500 room piece of American history and culture. It was opened a mere 28 years ago and was made popular by Frank Sinatra and a host of other notable celebrities who slept in its rooms and gambled in its casino while also entertaining on its stages. The Sands Hotel demolition was a controlled implosion type of procedure that took place at 9:30 pm on a fall evening in 2007. What were the reasons behind this spectacular demolition event?
The actual demolition took place with all the flair one would expect of Atlantic City. The site was bathed in multi-colored lights and a recording of Frank Sinatra’s “Bye, Bye, Baby” was blaring over loud speakers. The Governor of New Jersey and the Chairman of the company that was going to build the replacement pushed a wooden handled plunger. A total of 17 explosions, each a tenth of a second apart, rang out from inside the grand structure. After a delay of five seconds, the Sands leaned slightly to the Northeast, exactly as predicted, and then collapsed in a cloud of dust and a pile of debris.
When the Sands opened in August of 1980, it was the queen of Atlantic City. With 500 rooms and 57,045 square feet of gambling space, it brought the glamour of Las Vegas to the East Coast. However, the world is moving very fast these days. By the turn of the century, the Sands was the smallest of the 12 major casinos in Atlantic City and had turned into a bit of a relic that steadily lost its customer base to the innovative new entries on the Boardwalk. The Sands had to file for bankruptcy and was sold for 250 million dollars to a company that had plans to tear it down and replace it with a casino and hotel with 2000 rooms and 120,000 square feet of gambling space.
The spectacular demolition cleared the way for ground breaking on the new casino, which is still unnamed, and is expected to be opened in late 2011 or early 2012. In addition to being a showy example of implosion, it also was a good example of the precision of the procedure. The Sands was located very close to other major structures and the collapse was done in such a way that no nearby building was touched.
The lesson of the Sands Hotel demolition is that it is not merely the old and the unsafe buildings that are brought down by demolition. The world moves on in an ever quickening pace, and the idea of “outdated” changes drastically. The Sands Hotel was not that old and far from used up, but it had to step aside to make way for the new. There is a place for preservation, but it was not in the highly lucrative real estate of Atlantic City.