Just five seconds after Tuesday morning's fireworks display, the Las Vegas Conservation Society did its best, crushing another legendary attraction.

At 2:37 a.m., the 65-year-old New Frontier met his final resting place in his parking lot at 3120 south of Las Vegas Boulevard.

"It's going to be explosive," said professional card player Brett "Gank" Jungblut, who gathered with more than 20 friends at the tailgate on the roof of Wynn's parking lot.

"Tequila and beer are exactly what nights like this demand," continued the festival's Jungblut, which recalls personal memories of the Frontier's country west bar, known for its bikini bull riding.

But not everyone in the crowd of thousands was too happy to see the second-oldest property on the Las Vegas strip crumble.

"It's kind of sad," said Bambi Mitchell, who is on vacation in Iowa. "Sometimes I miss the old casinos where I can actually hear coins coming out of the slot machine.

"But that's how it goes. History has to move on. It's interesting at the same time. You don't see the implosion every day."

If your name is not Freddie Rankin, you are the supervisor of Klaus Construction who helped destroy four Las Vegas casinos.

"This was a bit of a small guy," Rankin joked about the 16-story building. "But there's a lot that can go wrong whenever there's an interior collapse. I didn't smile until all this came to the floor.

"It was an outstanding homebody."

New Frontier, which will be replaced by a multibillion-dollar Plaza-branded resort, doesn't bring out the same nostalgia as the demolition of the historic Stardust, Desert Inn or Sands casino has done before.

Visitors associate these more famous hotels with the vintage charm of Las Vegas before the strip was purchased by companies and promoted globally with the help of hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing campaigns and media and entertainment related to it. Even though Elvis Presley was a destination to make his Las Vegas debut or hosted other popular shows such as Ziegfried, Roy, and Wayne Newton, New Frontier was just another affordable room for Streep for many tourists.

Nevertheless, this internal collapse has been an emotional experience for many locals who are accustomed to the property's more distant past.

Frontier began as a Fair O'Dice casino built by R.E. Griffith, a British theater owner, in the 1930s. In 1942, it was reborn as a Western theme of Last Frontier, making it one of Strip's first themed casinos before the flamingos even sparkled in the eyes of Bugsy Siegel.

The name was changed to New Frontier in 1955, but the Western theme was discontinued in 1967, when it was rebuilt as sleek and modern Frontier for its day. Years later it got the New Frontier name again.  에볼루션 바카라사이트

In recent years, the property has only been a landowner's possession, received little investment and served as a place for tourists to go to bed after sightseeing elsewhere.

The New Frontier became a symbol of a rejuvenated labor movement in the 1990s, when culinary union workers, upset by management's manipulation of pay and benefits plans, eventually went on strike that lasted six years and four months. The strike ended in February 1998 after receiving national attention from politicians and has since remained a strong rallying cry for unions, motivating numerous organizational meetings and protests.

"It was a huge victory for the labor movement," said cooking union president and organizer Geoconda Aguello-Kline during the New Frontier strike. "These workers fought for themselves and their families. And they sent a message that the city was going to be a union town."

While the incident established Las Vegas as a nationwide union success story, the property's next incarnation begins a new chapter that will prove even more important to Streep's future.

The owners of Plaza Las Vegas are Israeli billionaires who own vast businesses that have nothing to do with casinos. They represent a new generation of starry-eyed foreign owners who have spent billions of dollars rather than millions of dollars to own one of the most popular properties in the world. They bought the land for a record $1.2 billion, which is more than any seller, Phil Ruffin, or anyone in Las Vegas could have dreamed of a year ago.

The collapse of the New Frontier, an event that property casino bosses call a thorn in their side of the rapidly gentrifying boulevard and a reminder of the threatening power of the Culinary Association, could not have come so soon for some. For others, the demolition was bitter.