Sands Casino Hotel to be imploded at 9:30 tonight

ATLANTIC CITY - It may once have been among the runts of Atlantic City's casinos, but the fabled Sands Casino Hotel will be going out with a big bang tonight.

The 21-story casino - once home to the smallest gaming floor in town and the famed Copa Room, where Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack often performed - is to be imploded at 9:30 p.m. in what promises to be a giant party.

Typical of Atlantic City's ballyhoo style, the 18-second sequence of explosions will climax an evening of fireworks and other festivities that city officials hope will lure tourists.

The Las Vegas-based Pinnacle Entertainment Inc. will redevelop the Sands site at Indiana and Pacific Avenues with a $1.5 billion megacasino resort scheduled to open by 2012.

The Sands, which dates to 1980, will be gone in a cloud of dust when demolition crews press the button on 400 pounds of sequenced explosives designed to collapse the floors of the old tower onto itself like a melting ice cream cone, according to Jim Santoro, project manager for Maryland-based Controlled Demolition Inc.

If all goes well, the concrete and reinforcing rod structure will cascade into a heap confined to where the Sands used to be.

It's not just a demolition project. Casino officials are making the Sands' demise into a spectator event, complete with invitation-only parties for high-rollers and fireworks for crowds that are expected to gather along the Boardwalk and beach.

"Most first-time visitors come to Atlantic City for something other than gaming," said Jeffrey Vasser, executive director of the Atlantic City Convention and Visitors Authority. "If it takes an implosion to get them here, then I'm all for it."

Vasser said his office had been inundated with phone calls and Internet requests for implosion information over the last two weeks. He couldn't say how many visitors might come to see Atlantic City's first implosion.

But Vasser and other officials said they expected tens of thousands.

Casino hotels up and down the Boardwalk, as well as non-gaming enterprises, have created parties, room promotions, and special cocktails to commemorate the event.

The Sands, which was called the Brighton for its first year in honor of the historic hotel that was torn down where it was built, was the place where Sinatra used to hang his hat when he was in town. The rest of his Rat Pack cronies also routinely hung out and performed there during the casino's heyday in the 1980s and '90s. It closed in November.

Although the Pinnacle project is still being designed, the developer decided it could make no use of the 27-year-old Sands building. It sold millions of dollars' worth of interior kitsch and exterior facade in a gigantic sale this spring.

More than 11,000 tons of junk not purchased by pack-rats and bargain hunters during the sale has already been carted away. After the implosion, it will take at least three months to clear 100,000 tons of concrete and other debris, Pinnacle officials said.

Implosions have become de rigueur in Las Vegas, as the old Aladdin, Desert Inn, Stardust and others have been dynamited to make way for newer, bigger casinos.

The Sands is the first gambling hall in Atlantic City to be imploded to make way for a new casino. The implosion will also be New Jersey's first nighttime building demolition.

"The implosion is kind of a good way to say to Atlantic City that the Pinnacle is here," Kim Townsend, chief executive officer of Pinnacle Atlantic City, said yesterday. "But from a demolition standpoint, we've been told it is also the safest and most efficient way to bring down the building.

"We decided that if it is going to be done this way, then we should make it a glamorous Vegas-style event, and that is what we are trying to do," Townsend said.

In a move to block the Sands demolition, an adjacent small-hotel owner, Vincent Barth, had his Cherry Hill lawyer, Clifford L. Van Syoc, seek a court order halting the implosion, saying it would create toxic dust.

Townsend said Pinnacle had obtained all necessary permits for the demolition.

Beware of gridlock that often occurs when there is a big event in Atlantic City. Starting at 5 p.m., many streets will be closed to traffic for the Sands implosion. Streets will be closed from Atlantic Avenue to the Boardwalk from Ohio to Kentucky Avenues, including Indiana Avenue, Martin Luther King Boulevard, and Mount Vernon Avenue.

Fireworks are scheduled for immediately before the implosion.

- Jacqueline L. Urgo

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