Crabtree Valley Hotel Implosion The former Sheraton/Clarion Hotel at Crabtree Valley in Raleigh, North Carolina was imploded to make way for the new 480 foot, 47 story skyscraper called the Soleil Center. This occured in the drizzling rain among a large crowd scattered among various vantage points at 7:30 AM on May 7th, 2006. The building implosion and demolition was performed by D.H. Griffin. Video Runtime: 27 seconds - 2MB Click the photo at right for video of the implosion. The original size of the video has been reduced for faster load times. For the longer running and higher quality original version, click here. This version is 8MB. Onto the pics....