After it’s imploded on Wednesday morning, the best way to relive memories of the Tropicana Las Vegas will be to head two miles east of the vacant lot to UNLV.

Nevada’s largest university recently received five boxes of history from the Rat Pack-era casino resort, most of which it has processed and made available for public perusal — both in person and online.

But UNLV didn’t wait for the Tropicana’s owner to approach them. As soon as it heard that Bally’s was planning to close and demolish the historic property — which it purchased in 2022 for $148 million from Gaming & Leisure Properties — the university’s Special Collections and Archives department contacted the casino resort’s general manager.

“We met with them early on to explain what we were interested in,” Sarah Quigley, director of  the department, told Casino.org. “And then, as they were decommissioning the building, the staff gathered things up and we went over one day and just picked it up.”

They Paved Paradise…

As will be demonstrated on Wednesday morning, Las Vegas is notorious for looking incessantly forward at the expense of preserving its history.

But universities like UNLV — even though they can’t help save buildings, do their best to preserve the details of what happened inside of them, so future historians can paint more accurate pictures about the past.

Its Tropicana collection consists of architectural drawings from various renovations, business reports, memos, menus, financial information, and training manuals for staff.

“The training manuals are, I think, what tell us the most about how a business was operated and the impact that it likely had on the surrounding community,” Quigley told us. “For example, we have the manual that they gave to their phone operators, which describes not only how they were to run the telecoms, but the expectations from them in terms of customer service.

“That tells us a lot about the culture of a business, and how this one stayed in business so long.”

There are also more glamorous components, such as photos, programs and brochures from the most of the Tropicana’s entertainment offerings.

There’s even a box of unseen film reels from the longest-running show in Las Vegas history. The showgirl show “Folies Bergère” ran at the Tropicana from 1959 through until 2009. Shot by the Tropicana in the 1970s, this footage — which Quigley categorizes as “super cool” — has yet to be digitized, so it’s not available to the public at the moment.

“I think that would be something good to put online when the time comes,” she said.

Expect to eventually see it see it in a ton of future documentaries about Las Vegas.

UNLV’s Special Collections department preserves more than 11,000 linear feet of archival and manuscript collections at its main library, Lied, located at 4505 S. Maryland Parkway. While larger universities may have larger collections, UNLV is the only one in Las Vegas, which means that its gaming collection is unrivaled in the world.

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