Friday, Nov. 21, 1997 | 10:16 a.m.
The 31-year-old Aladdin hotel-casino is scheduled to close at 6 p.m. Tuesday and will be imploded in February, officials said.
The 17-story resort, once considered among the most luxurious in town but long plagued by financial woes, is set to be imploded to make room for a much larger Aladdin.
The Sigman Sommer Family Trust, which owns the Aladdin, announced in September that it would close the property and lay off its nearly 1,500 employees.
Officials said today they will give those workers priority consideration when the new $1.2 billion resort opens in late 1999 or early 2000.
"I know it's not full consolation for the trauma of the loss of a job," Aladdin President Richard Goeglein said in a news release. "But it is necessary that the property close so that this ... new resort can be built.
"And we want the people who have been with the Aladdin ... through it all to know they are appreciated and will not be forgotten."
The 7,000-seat Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts will be preserved, officials said.
The new resort will include a 2,600-room hotel at a cost of $700 million and a music-themed resort venture with Planet Hollywood International Inc. at a cost of $250 million.
Retail and restaurant space, totaling 450,000 square feet, will cost an additional $215 million.
The Aladdin opened in 1966 on the site of the Tally-Ho Motel, which was built in 1963.
During its long and rocky tenure -- blamed in part on it being too far south of the hottest Strip action -- the resort struggled through lean financial times.
Not even part ownership by entertainer Wayne Newton in the early 1980s could turn things around.
Japanese billionaire Ginji Yasuda bought the Aladdin and shut it down in September 1986 to remodel the resort at a cost of $30 million. He shocked Las Vegas by keeping all 465 Aladdin employees at the time on the payroll.
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