VEGAS TO GIVE MORE BANG FOR NEW YEAR'S EVE BUCK.

Byline: Carey Goldberg The New York Times

Dropping a ball is all very well, of course. Quaint, really.

But when New Year's Eve rolls around in Las Vegas this year, the revelers on the Strip will be watching giant fireballs burst before their eyes, dancing to live bands and, on the stroke of midnight East Coast time, witnessing the implosion of a 12-story, 900-room hotel that will send the year out with a kaboom.

``It's gotten to be one of the biggest parties in the country,'' said Rob Powers, a spokesman for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors' Authority, who predicted that the Strip crowd may surpass the multitudes in New York's Times Square this year.

Even if it does not, the question - one that may ruffle many a New Yorker's civic pride - is whether the year-end party in the capital of glitz is supplanting Times Square's festivities as the nation's signature New Year's Eve spectacle.

New Year's Eve celebrations in Las Vegas, which bring in tens of millions of dollars in business, have grown steadily over the past several years, as the city has found new ways to send entertainment over the top, outdoing the other gambling spots sprouting around the country through sheer scale and ingenuity.

The city's boom - the Las Vegas metropolitan area is now the fastest growing in the nation - has added thousands of locals to the celebrating masses, and its reconstituted image as more of an adult Disneyland has helped bring in more visitors.

Last year, 186,000 visitors spent New Year's weekend there, and this year's estimates top 200,000, filling hotels almost to capacity despite the 8,000 new rooms available. Police and Las Vegas officials say they expect between 200,000 and 400,000 revelers on the Strip on New Year's Eve, and an additional 20,000 or so at a tickets-only gala in the downtown Fremont Street section.

``We're trying to rival New York,'' said Kara Kelley of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. ``It's becoming something people put on their calendars to do. It's now, `Where do we want to spend New Year's Eve?' `Oh, let's go to Las Vegas.' ''

But New York is running hard to stay ahead. The Times Square Business Improvement District took over the management of New Year's Eve celebrations four years ago and has done everything from refurbishing the ball that drops at One Times Square to starting a confetti drop, giving away pompons and, this year, even planning to provide 3,000 ``confetti bags'' so people can gather up souvenirs to take home.

With the publicity generated by the new six-foot, light-covered ball, officials from the Times Square improvement district estimate that nearly a half-million people attended the festivities last year, though a more usual attendance is about 300,000. And they bridle at the suggestion that the upstart Las Vegas could ever rival Times Square as a midnight venue.

``I don't think there's any way to compete with a 92-year-old tradition,'' said Gretchen Dykstra, president of the Times Square group. ``There's something quite magical and magnetic about a tradition that has lasted so long in a pure form.''

She added that the group had also made New Year's Eve more telegenic and would be providing a free live video feed this year to stations around the world.

``Las Vegas is going to have a lot of catching up to do when last year we estimated that 300 million people saw the event worldwide,'' Dykstra said. Gathering New Year's crowds is far more than a matter of prestige; it means tens of millions of dollars in business.

The Times Square group estimates that last year's revelers spent a total of $24.5 million on things like hotel rooms and food, an average of $53 a person, and had an overall economic impact on the city of $49 million. The event, in contrast, cost only $400,000 to stage, Dykstra said.

In Las Vegas, the Convention and Visitors' Authority estimated the economic impact of last year's New Year's visitors at $82.8 million, excluding gambling, over the three-day weekend. They expect this year's awkwardly midweek celebrations to bring in $55.9 million over two days.

By and large, the two cities do not appear to compete directly for the same visitors. Las Vegas draws most of its guests from California and other Western states, and Las Vegas officials said it might be best to see the Strip simply as the Times Square of the West for New Year's partygoers.

But though they tried to stay diplomatically uncompetitive, some of the people staging this year's celebration in Las Vegas could not resist a dig at the stodgy traditionalism of New York's show compared with the brash flashiness of blowing up a building to mark the new year.

And it seemed no coincidence that the implosion was to come at midnight Eastern time, though Las Vegas police said that was done partly to keep the crowd at midnight Las Vegas time from getting totally out of control.

The Fox network, which is planning to carry much of the revelry live, also is hoping that the explosion, as the centerpiece of its New Year's Eve coverage, will draw viewers away from the ball in New York and the other networks.

Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition Inc., the Maryland company that will blow up the 10-year-old, 900-room Hacienda hotel to make room for a new 4,000-room mega-resort owned by Circus Circus Enterprises Inc., said the night on the Strip would be wild, wild, wild.

His 26-year-old daughter, Stacey, will run the pyrotechnical display before and after the Hacienda is blown up, he said, after an initial fireworks show by the Grucci firm of Long Island. She will run a waterfall along the entire 600-foot length of the building, he said, and send out waves of flashes of bright lights, loud reports and balls of fire.

At exactly midnight East Coast time, he said, a huge fireball will erupt from the Hacienda's roof ``and kaboom! A few wings and the center will just collapse, and as the dust goes up into the air, your eyes will follow the dust and you'll see another aerial pyrotechnical display.''

How exactly it all works will depend on factors like the wind, he said, but ``no matter what, it's got to be better than Times Square.''

Times Square officials pointed out that the New York celebration also has a light and laser show as well as fireworks visible over Central Park, but they said there would be nothing like the live performances that will fill the Strip in Vegas.

The Strip, which will be closed to traffic from 6 p.m. until 2 a.m. on New Year's Eve, will feature Hootie and the Blowfish, Salt and Peppa, Sinbad and the Doobie Brothers.

``Times Square will always be Times Square,'' said Kelley of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. ``But I think Las Vegas is becoming a viable alternative.''