In true Las Vegas style, the once-glitzy casino Stardust that was famed for its mobster past and as the inspiration for the blockbuster movie Casino, went out today with a bang.

The casino, which opened in 1958 as the world's biggest resort hotel with 1,032 rooms, was demolished following a spectacular firework display to make way for a $4.4 billion ($3.34 billion) mega-resort complex.

Famed for bargain rooms, friendly service and loss-leading food and drink, the 32-storey casino is the tallest building to be demolished on the famous gambling strip.

It will be replaced with a new resort, Echelon Place, that will boast more than 5,000 hotel rooms, a production theatre, concert venue and a shopping mall.

Hundreds of people watched the explosion, which for many marked the end of an era.

“It hurts. We cried,” said Sheila Navarro, 51, from Oxnard, California, who was with her three sisters, mother, an aunt and a brother-in-law to say farewell to the casino she’s gambled at for more than 30 years.

“It’s very hard for me to find another casino to go to,” she said. “Maybe in two years, three years, I’ll have different feelings, but right now, my heart is broken.”

The Stardust was credited as being the first mass-market casino because of its cheap rooms and food and drink — a concept that is rapidly fading from Las Vegas with many casinos making more money from hotel rooms and shows than gambling.

“There was this implicit idea that invisible high rollers came in and funded everything, so that Mr and Mrs America could have a steak for $2 and see Frank Sinatra for the price of a drink,” said David Schwartz, director of the Centre for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada.

Stardust became famous for its mob connections and was the inspiration for the 1995 film Casino, in which Robert De Niro played a character based on Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, who ran the resort in the mid-1970s. The casino was bought by Boyd Gaming Corp in 1985 after the owners lost their gambling licence.

Over the next two decades the casino's lustre began to fade. A big blow came in 1991 with the cancellation of its Lido de Paris showgirl extravaganza after a 32-year run.

Nearly 200kg of explosives was used to demolish the Stardust today and twenty water cannons were standing by to control the dust cloud. The clean up of the site was expected to take up to two months.

Anthony Curtis, president of the tourist website LasVegasAdvisor.com, said: “From the bargain-seeking aspect of it, every time an old one goes and a new one comes, you kind of go, ’That’s not so good.’ But there’s still a lot of the old stuff in Vegas.

"In my opinion, the new Las Vegas is a better Vegas. These places, they did their job, they lived their lives, and it’s time for the next.”

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