'It was truly amazing.'ĭickerson, 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. 'We don't do this in Wisconsin,' she said after the dust had almost settled. The 200-room casino-hotel opened in 1970 as the Royal Inn and was called the Debbie Reynolds - for its one-time owner - as well as the Greek Isles and the Paddle Wheel.Īmanda 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's bucket list: witness a building implosion in person. 'Hopefully 13 will be a lucky number,' Lorenzo Doumani, the site's new owner and developer, said a few hours before he and his family counted down to the Clarion's final seconds at nearly 3 a.m., flanked by two showgirls and having listened to a pre-implosion soundtrack of Frank Sinatra. The 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. LAS VEGAS - With a 4,400-pound explosive punch, a Las Vegas hotel turned into a pile of rubble early Tuesday.
