One Georgia city will welcome 2025 with a larger-than-average bang. The Macon-Bibb County Commission will implode a vacant 16-story hotel that once housed Elvis at midnight on New Year’s Eve. The County spent $4.5 million last year to buy the hotel in a federal bankruptcy proceeding and then agreed to hire a demolition firm to blow up the building at a cost of up to $2.6 million.

“We acquired this property to blow it up,” Macon Mayor Lester Miller told WMAZ-TV.

The hotel was opened in 1970 and its guests included Elvis, but it was never a financial success.

Most notably, the New York Banking Department seized the hotel in 1991, saying it was one asset that was part of a fraud and money-laundering scheme linked to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The bank was accused of helping Saddam Hussein hide Iraqi oil profits and backing Oliver North’s arms deals with Iran.

Last operating as the Ramada Plaza, the hotel on the northern edge of downtown Macon a block from the Ocmulgee River, has stood vacant since it closed in 2017.

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