When Eastside Cannery debuted in the summer of 2008, hundreds of people waited outside to enter Las Vegas’ newest hotel-casino on opening night.
Some waited a few hours to explore the $250 million project on Boulder Highway.
“We think it adds a new dimension to the east side of town,” developer Bill Wortman said at the time. “We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve done here.”
Less than 20 years later, the current owners have imploded the hotel and want to sell the land for housing. And while Las Vegas has a long history of casino implosions, the Eastside Cannery went down much earlier than other hotels that were also emptied, laced with explosives and, in seconds, reduced to rubble.
“This (was) much more recent,” UNLV history professor Michael Green said.
In America’s casino capital, hotel implosions are a spectacle: they are often early-morning parties, with fireworks and crowds of people gathering to watch and cheer the destruction.
There were no designated public viewing areas for the Eastside Cannery implosion or any fireworks. But several people were outside at a nearby mobile home park to watch the building come down, and the Longhorn Casino across the street was trying to cash in on the event.
“Join us at our implosion party!” its sign outside declared.
The implosion that started it all
The Eastside Cannery, on Boulder Highway at Harmon Avenue, had been closed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Work crews demolished parts of the property recently, but the 16-story hotel tower remained standing until demolition crews imploded it at 2 a.m. on March 5.
In total, the Eastside Cannery contained over 300 hotel rooms, a 64,000-square-foot casino, several bars and restaurants, a 250-seat lounge, and 20,000 square feet of meeting and ballroom space.
Its footprint spans approximately 29.5 acres, and owner Boyd Gaming Corp. has said there was insufficient market demand to reopen the site and that it intends to sell the site for residential use.
Hotels in Las Vegas have often imploded to make room for bigger, flashier resorts. For example, the Dunes, which opened in 1955, imploded in 1993 and was replaced by the Bellagio.
More than 200,000 people turned out to watch the extensive destruction of the dunes.
Casino developer Steve Wynn ordered a pirate ship at his newly opened Treasure Island to “shoot” at the neighboring hotel, which, after being laced with dynamite and explosives, then collapsed into a pile of rubble, according to the Neon Museum.
The contractor even used black gunpowder to create a brighter flash, according to the museum, which says the Dunes was one of the oldest casinos on the Strip and was the first hotel on the strip to be brought down using explosives.
“The Nature of the Industry”
Green, of UNLV, said many Las Vegas hotels built in the 1950s were considered state-of-the-art for their time. But standards and attitudes can change, he added.
He said that while it pains him as a historian to see resorts torn down, he understands that it is “the nature of the business.”
He also agreed that imploded hotels in Las Vegas were usually older than the Eastside Cannery when it broke.
Overall, Las Vegas hotels were often at least three decades old when they imploded.
Not everyone in Southern Nevada decides to implode a hotel when they want to demolish it. And in one high-profile case, as Green pointed out, a hotel was taken down before it was even finished.
The never-completed Harmon hotel — a structurally flawed project that sparked massive litigation — was supposed to be part of the multi-tower CityCenter project on the Las Vegas Strip.
But work crews began dismantling Harmon around 2014, and developers bought the site in 2021 to build a retail project.
Brian Gordon, a principal at Las Vegas consulting firm Applied Analysis, noted that the Eastside Cannery was not the only hotel casino in Southern Nevada that never reopened after pandemic closures.
Those properties were nowhere near the Strip, and, Gordon pointed out, the owners chose to monetize them in a different way.
Station Casinos never reopened Fiesta Henderson, Fiesta Rancho and Texas Station after the state-mandated casino closures were lifted. The company eventually demolished them and sold the three locations for about $90 million combined.
Gordon said the pandemic shutdowns allowed casino operators to rethink their entire business model and some properties were unable to cope.
“Much more modern”
In the spring of 2007, Cannery Casino Resorts held a ceremonial groundbreaking for the Eastside Cannery.
Wortman, co-founder of the Cannery company, said the project marked a “new paradigm” for Boulder Highway and would be a “much more modern facility.”
Eastside Cannery replaced the 1970s Nevada Palace and opened amid a struggling economy that only got worse. In the month before its debut, Wortman said it was hard to gauge how customers would react to a new hotel-casino in the midst of an economic downturn.
But his team felt the new location would create excitement on the east side of the city, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
“There hasn’t been anything new down here for years,” he said.
In 2016, Boyd Gaming acquired the Cannery hotel casino in North Las Vegas and the Eastside Cannery from Wortman’s company for $230 million in cash.
Boyd President and CEO Keith Smith said the deal expanded its presence in the local casino market “at an attractive price.”
He also cited Eastside Cannery’s proximity to the neighboring Sam’s Town hotel-casino, also owned by Boyd.
“Much overcapacity”
In March 2020, then-Gov. Steve Sisolak ordered casinos and other businesses in Nevada to close to help limit the outbreak of the coronavirus. Nevada’s casinos were allowed to reopen in June 2020, but the Eastside Cannery never did.
Michelle Rasmusson, Boyd’s chief compliance officer, told Clark County officials in a spring 2024 letter that the company had “abundant excess capacity” at Sam’s Town and that market conditions did not support reopening its neighbor.
Early last year, Boyd bought the land under the Eastside Cannery from Wortman for $45 million. The company had leased the footprint but declined to say why it bought the land.
Then, in October, Boyd announced plans to demolish the defunct hotel casino and sell the site. And last month it said the hotel tower itself would implode.
Wyatt Diaz-Gomez, who lives near UNLV, saw the early morning incident from a nearby mobile home park.
“It was pretty cool,” he said.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@ theplayerlounge.com or 702-383-0342.
