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.
