This picture and comment was posted by Rick Ackerman in September 2012. Take a bow Rick. You were right.
Workers are shuttering the $2.4 billion white elephant of Atlantic City – Revel Casino. Fat Boy Christie will hold another summit to save Atlantic City in a couple weeks. Watch out NJ taxpayers. He has already wasted hundreds of millions on Revel and the rest of this dying town.
Atlantic City has always been a shit town. The casinos promised to revive the city. They did nothing for the city. They cashed in the profits from having a monopoly on the east coast. Now everyone has casinos and their revenues have plunged by 50% in the last eight years. Four casinos have gone belly up this year.
Atlantic City will not be revived. It’s a dangerous shithole inhabited by Obama voters. More casinos will close. The city budget now has a gaping hole as property taxes and sales taxes from the casinos are gone. How are the free shit army going to get their goodies?
The short sightedness and idiocy of politicians and CEOs has never been more on display than with the implosion of Atlantic City. Fast Eddie Rendell and the rest of the politicians who see gambling and lotteries as the savior for their bloated entitlement budgets will all find out you can’t get blood from a stone. The disposable income of the stupid is almost all gone.
As Atlantic City casinos close, ghost town replaces boardwalk empire
It was 90 degrees at the Jersey Shore yesterday and the north beach in Atlantic City was almost empty.
The boardwalk, too, except for a few tourists who wandered up the quarter mile of bare boards to gawk and photograph the mirrored walls and imposing tower of the resort’s latest glass-and-steel white elephant, the Revel.
The exterior murals of Revel have a surfing endless summer kind of theme, but what is happening in Atlantic City now is the beginning of a long winter.
The Showboat closed Sunday and next door neighbor Revel closed Monday, taking with them about 4,000 jobs, leaving the north end of the boardwalk a ghost town.
Trump Plaza, which is connected to the famed Boardwalk Hall, will close Sept. 16, after the Miss America pageant.
Miss America returned to home Atlantic City two year ago, seven years after running off to Vegas, to fulfill its original promise of bringing tourists to the boardwalk for New Jersey’s beautiful month of September. But it won’t save Trump Plaza, which along with Caesars next door, were the center stanchions of Atlantic City’s gambling era heyday.
This was in the mid-1980s when the town hosted the megafights of the day: Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks; Tyson and Larry Holmes; Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran III; and, Evander Holyfield and George Foreman.
The casinos led by Trump and Caesars kicked in for site fees and Vegas couldn’t compete. But that is ancient history now, as ancient as Caesar himself.
When Trump Plaza closes, the workforce casualties will rise to nearly 6,000, about 20 percent of Atlantic City’s hospitality workforce.
Gaming in Atlantic City isn’t dead, but it has to go on a crash diet to survive.
The all-time high revenue of $5.2 billion from eight years ago has fallen by 50 percent, eroded by out-of-state competition, sometimes brought on by the very same companies that built up Atlantic City. (See The Sands in Bethlehem, Pa., which has siphoned off a huge piece of the New York bus trip market.) Now companies are closing even profitable casinos, like Caesars shutting The Showboat to try and protect the health of its three other properties in Atlantic City.
Bill Terrigino sees it not as the death of the town, but a painful evolution.
“The fascination of slot machines is over with,” Terrigino said. “More gambling isn’t the solution. If we don’t make it fun for people in Atlantic City, they’ll make us irrelevant.”
FUN IN THE SURF
And what could be more fun than that big blue thing out there.
From the start of the casino era, Atlantic City turned its back on its history as “the beach” and “the boardwalk.”
“The primary focus has been gambling,” said Bruce Abrams, who works in the city-run art museum across the boards from The Showboat. It was almost empty yesterday as was the adjacent history museum.
“We threw all the eggs in one basket. Maybe this is a wake-up call.”
True enough, the early casinos faced Pacific Avenue and trying to find the boardwalk through them entailed going through a maze of spinning wheels and ringing bells.
Still today, there are long stretches of the boardwalk with nothing to eat except in the overpriced casinos, few restrooms and changing facilities — and parking is expensive and distant.
Atlantic City took its greatest attraction and made it inaccessible.
As for amusements, the rides at the famed Steel Pier look like nothing more than a local church carnival bolted to the boards.
WHERE IS EVERYONE?
Even yesterday — 90 degrees and sunny on a day that is still summer for everyone without school children — the beaches were far, far from packed.
“Our beaches are beautiful. You can’t beat it,’ said Terrigino, “but other towns do better bringing people to the beach.”
Terrigino and his wife, Kathy, were two of the first workers to lose their jobs when the Atlantic Club closed last winter.
“These are the bookends,” said Terrigino, who lives across the street from Revel. “The Atlantic Club was all the way at the south end of the boardwalk, and Revel is at the north end. I lost my job last winter and yesterday (Monday) I lost my neighbor.”
They also own the house closest to the beach near the Revel.
Yesterday, there were more gawkers looking at the empty hotels — few as they were — and men pushing empty rolling chairs, than there were people on the north beach.
If you want to know what went wrong in Atlantic City, there it is.
If you want to know how to fix it, there it is.
Somebody should tell Las Vegas whats coming. Imagine going to the desert and walking on the sand one day, right into the 11th floor of a broken structure and thinking what were they thinking? Fuck sakes, LV is Atlantic City without the Atlantic. Maybe all the somali’s and african immigrants will go there, it’ll seem like home with better structures.
What? Fools are not born every minute?
I don’t know all the reasons why AC failed (I’m sure there are quite a few) because I HONESTLY don’t give flying fuck about AC, the state of NJ, or even gambling. All three can fuck off and die tomorrow for all I care.
But, I lived in Ocean City (about 30 miles away) in the summers of 1978 – 1979 … the first year of gambling via Resorts International. I kind of recall ALL of south Jersey walking around with boners (even the women). Every, fucking, day … for a year or more, newspapers and their editors were ejaculating all over themselves at the prospect of BIG $$$$$$$$$$$ (millions .. hundreds of millions over the next couple decades) flowing into city & state coffers. New schools! New businesses! New services! New and pretty housing! Revitalization!! Atlantic City would soon have streets of gold … it would become the Vegas of the East Cost. Every. Fucking. Day. lmfmfao
Next door to us was guy who was also a casual friend. He just graduated in 1978 with some engineering degree … and decided to become a dealer at Resorts. I tried to reason with him. Asked him why he literally wasted four years of education. What will he do 10 years down the line if it doesn’t work out? Why would you want a job where your livelihood basically depends on impoverishing others? He had an answer for everything, which had this general form; “I don’t give a shit. I’m gonna be RICH!!”. I have a big old boner just thinking about AC and the casinos failing, I wish I could run into him again, so I can shove my python down his throat. I just love getting the last laugh.
To determine whether and how Atlantic City can restore its validity as a beachfront summertime destination – as opposed to a year-round gambling mecca – it’s necessary to look at the whole Jersey Shore, from Sandy Hook to Cape May, and determine what brings people down the Garden State Parkway and east by way of the Atlantic City Expressway to the Wildwoods, to Seaside Heights, to Ocean City and to Cape May.
A lifelong resident of South Jersey might observe that before the government in Trenton and the corporate clowns in the “gaming industry” moved in the mid-’70s to transform Atlantic City into Las Vegas East, the chief advantage of the Jersey Shore had been close proximity to major population centers and thus accessibility to day-trippers from New York, Philadelphia, and points north and west thereof.
The greatest number of these people wanted (and continue to want) entertainment and other diversions that can be gotten at low cost, and are deterred by prices they rightly consider exorbitant – even predatory – in accommodations and meals.
The casino chieftains looked for their bottom line to customers of greater-than-average wealth, buttressed by a steady flow of stupid “gamers” of middling income, failing to realize that the enticements of Atlantic City were insufficient to hold those who could afford to visit venues with greater cachet while the low-ball gamblers would be swept up by legalized enticements closer to their homes.
Why go to the oceanside just to sit in big buildings where it’s impossible even to tell whether it’s day or night?
The present condition of Atlantic City is an example of malinvestment induced by political intervention in the marketplace, first selectively to privilege the municipality with a monopoly on legalized “gaming” and then generally to induce unproductive entrepreneurial activity – building, staffing, and running those monstrous casino complexes – with tax breaks from Trenton and the easy credit provided by the Federal Reserve System.
Keynesian “priming the pump” politically to create the sort of unsustainable boom that cannot help but go bust.
build it ( financed with taxpayer cash) and they will come.
If you don’t realize by now that banksters dominate all local and state EDAs then it’s likely you’ll get the credit pimp python up you local economy’s ass in the very near future, if you haven’t already.
NEW PARTNERSHIP FORGED TO UNDERTAKE SIGNIFICANT REVITALIZATION PROJECTS IN ATLANTIC CITY
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MOU Between EDA and CRDA Supports Christie Administration’s Plan to Redevelop Significant Part of Atlantic City’s South Inlet
TRENTON, N.J. (June 12, 2012) – Building on the Christie Administration’s commitment to revitalizing Atlantic City, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (EDA) today approved a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Authority and the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA) that provides up to $50 million in financing for projects in the Southwest Inlet. The non-binding MOU authorizes the EDA to borrow a maximum of $50 million in special obligation loans from a lender to be identified through a competitive process. The CRDA is expected to take action on the MOU at its June 19 meeting.
“These funds are designed to advance significant, new development projects and recreational amenities in Atlantic City’s Southwest Inlet, which is one of the most beautiful and viable waterfront locations on the East Coast,” said Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno. “With the implementation of this MOU, the CRDA can begin work on improving the Atlantic City Inlet area adjacent to Revel Atlantic City and facilitating infrastructure improvements and development of new housing and retail projects.”
The CRDA has asked the EDA to borrow the maximum of $50 million in a special obligation loan from an approved lender in the form of two notes issued approximately 12 to 24 months apart and to advance the proceeds of the loan to the CRDA.
Once a lender is selected, the EDA will negotiate terms of the financing commitment. The EDA members must then approve both the lender and terms of the loan. Request for Proposals will be made available July 9 on the EDA website at http://www.njeda.com.
On May 15th, CRDA authorized a Preliminary Determination of Project Eligibility for the South Inlet Mixed Use Development Project involving portions of five city blocks in the South Inlet. The blocks are bordered by Connecticut, Rhode Island, Oriental and Pacific Avenues and encompass the Absecon Lighthouse and Park. The Preliminary Determination is a process to allow for planning and future expenditure of funds.
“We are pleased to be partnering with EDA to move the South Inlet project forward. This project is critical to the revitalization of Atlantic City as outlined in the Tourism District Master Plan,” said CRDA Executive Director John Palmieri. “The swift actions of the EDA to provide a funding source are indicative of the support Gov. Christie pledged when the Tourism District was created.”
EDA Chief Executive Officer Caren Franzini noted that in addition to these funds, CRDA will utilize future Revel-based revenues to proceed with approved redevelopment projects in the Atlantic City Inlet area. The proposed loan structure is a first step to facilitate this activity by using the EDA loan proceeds to acquire, demolish and improve sites in the area adjacent to Revel identified for redevelopment.
As prescribed in the MOU, repayment for the loan will include the full amount of the Revel Entertainment-Retail District Sales Tax Rebate and future sales of properties. CRDA will provide first mortgages on project sites acquired to the EDA to secure the bank loan and provide debt service coverage of payments on the loan.
These investments follow the EDA Board’s February 2011 award of an Economic Redevelopment and Growth grant (ERG) of $261,364,000 to Revel Atlantic City.
In addition to paying $5 million in annual revenue district payments to CRDA, Revel is also committed to expend the ERG payments for new development projects and recreational amenities in the Southwest Inlet, in accordance with the City’s Inlet Revitalization Plan. Proceeds of the ERG payments will be timed after the revenue payments and after the public infrastructure for these sites is complete with the $50 million in proposed loan.
The Christie Administration has taken unprecedented measures to revitalize Atlantic City including stabilizing the city’s finances and creating jobs through new business investment, authorizing the creation of the Atlantic City Tourism District, providing for the reform and modernization of New Jersey’s casino regulatory structure and paving the way for new investments in Atlantic City by providing for the issuance of two new casino licenses for facilities with a lower minimum bedroom requirement of 200 rooms rather than the 500 previously mandated.
http://www.njeda.com/web/Aspx_pg/Templates/Press_Rls.aspx?topid=721&Doc_Id=1746&ParentDocID=164
Casinos are for the sheep who are not satisfied with wealth confiscation/transfer via inflation and taxes. The ironic part is that even if you “win” you still lose by paying even more!
Gambling – an industry that produces nothing – what value does it have? Gambling is for chumps. The glow wore off. The chumps now stay home.
AC is still the dump it used to be in the 1960’s.
I doubt that the glow wore off. Bring back the jobs and good times (like that’s gonna happen) and the chumps will resume their natural role in life.
Just came home from a trip to New Orleans and passed through some casino towns, principally Biloxi.
The city is still devastated from the Katrina flooding. Lots of empty lots beachside where old expensive homes once stood. Sad. Really sad actually. Like a big part of the South’s history got wiped out sad.
But, they completely screwed up with the casinos. Each was built as a self contained edifice, past walking distance from each other. Clearly designed to get you to stay in one place and not contribute a dime to the local economy. They’re as extractive as West Virginia coal mines–the only ones getting rich are the shareholders who have no idea how beautiful parts of West Virginia are.
City planners should have absolutely dictated some master plan, designed to tie them all together with a pedestrian beachside walkway with retail, restaurants, public space for those have no cash to spend, etc. When the gambling revenue dries up, what will be left is nothing. Had they planned it, even with no gambling revenue, it could have easily survived as a tourist destination. But it won’t with its present built environment.
Great post, and great comment thread, especially from Tucci78 and the great Stucky.
Trying to run an economy by selling each other hamburgers and insurance is bad enough, but to try to run an economy on robbing each other, from the taxpayers forced to fund this crap to the losers who are supposed to volunteer to be fleeced, is certain doom.
Let AC be a lesson to the politicians who still think that they can rescue their municipalities from the consequences of 50 years of overspending, and destruction of the local tax base, by fostering an “industry” that is socially destructive and predatory.