No Joy in Shoobietown

By |

We drove to Vermont last Friday, nine hours in the car with the kids, as you do, then turned around and drove home and when we got back the seasons had changed. There was an unmistakable charge in the air, big waves thumping into the beaches, and the wind blew steadily, crisply, offshore, to the delight of the surfers. Our rental house filled up with black flies from the salt marshes. They had followed us in the back door when we tried to have dinner on Labor Day outside, and they now take turns attacking my ankles, then copulating on the kitchen table. But underneath the weather, a more palpable change had taken place.

More about: Homepage Featured, opinion, Jersey Shore, Shoobies

Escalating The Surreality Stakes

By |

It wasn’t the first time he’d threatened to pack his bags and abandon the Revel. In fact, it wasn’t even the first time he’d threatened to do so this month. But Glenn Straub, the mercurial owner of the $2.4 billion defunct casino at the northeast end of the Atlantic City boardwalk, stormed out of a land-use meeting early Thursday afternoon, amid unspecific accusations of blackmail, saying he would “shut down” the mega-resort, which he bought for pennies on the dollar in 2015, “forever.” Revel is the second-largest building in the state of New Jersey, and the largest god-damned casino hotel in Atlantic City history. It has been closed for more than two years.

More about: Atlantic City, Business, Homepage Featured, Atlantic City, atlantic county, CRDA, Glenn Straub, planning

Mel’s Furniture Optimistic On Outlook For Inlet

By |

In Atlantic City’s Inlet neighborhood, a lot has come and gone. Mel’s Furniture, at 508 Atlantic Ave, has stayed the course since the 1950s. Philip Weinberg, son of founder Mel Weinberg, recently stopped to talk with us about the prospects for the area. A lot is riding on reviving the northern end of the boardwalk, home to two of the casinos that closed their doors in 2014 (Showboat and Revel) and the Trump Taj Mahal (slated to close this fall), but Weinberg said he is optimistic new owners at the first two properties can turn them around. More important for the furniture business will be the Stockton University campus, which could open in the next two years in the south of Atlantic City, he said.

More about: Business, Homepage Featured

Only Stupid People Pay Taxes

By |

Donald Trump got an 83% ($25 million) discount on his tax bill after “longtime friend” Chris Christie graduated from U.S. attorney for New Jersey to governor of the state, the New York Times reports, citing public records. Christie and his big mom pants are now top advisers to the Trump campaign, which as we all know is a false-flag operation to drumpf up publicity for the Trump TV media empire, meaning we may see Christie in the barber’s chair at Wrestlemania 2018. A Christie spokesman said the small matter of $25 million, which the state had been fighting with Trump over for years, was too inconsequential and “routine” for Christie to have even noticed at the time. The Times says Christie has known Trump since 2002, Christie was invited to Trump’s third wedding (2005) and that, “They have double dated with their wives.”

… The Atlantic City airshow happened Wednesday.

More about: opinion

Help Needed To Rebuild Atlantic City Memorial Park

By |

Councilman Kaleem Shabazz, of Atlantic City’s third ward, stoops to pick up a piece of litter and brush away a weed that’s obscuring a memorial plaque. No one else in the park – and there are about two dozen people hanging out under the large shady trees – seems to notice the councilman’s effort. Atlantic City’s government has secured the bulk of the funding it needs to transform the park from a stopping-place for drug users and homeless people into a recreation area for the hundreds of kids living on the neighboring blocks. But the city is seeking about $100,000 from Atlantic County’s open spaces fund for so-called ‘gap’ funding, to allow the city to officially start the project and release the funding from the non-profits and other organizations that are contributing most of the cash. The problem is that Atlantic County has not approved any open-spaces funding requests in the last two years.

More about: Atlantic City, Homepage Featured

Camp Revel

By |

Sometime around lunch on Monday of this week, Bill Terrigino of 227 Metropolitan Avenue stood outside gardening in one of the two yards on either side of his home in the South Inlet neighborhood of Atlantic City. Close readers of this space may remember Bill as the oft-chronicled inhabitant of a charming, cedar-sided Victorian house, nearly 110 years old, that has the interesting fate of being located directly across the street from the Revel casino hotel resort, the second-tallest building in the state of New Jersey and the most notorious casino flop in the history of Atlantic City and probably of the world, which sat about 50 feet to the west of Bill’s geraniums,* humming like a spaceship that was running out of electricity. Revel’s owner, an eccentric millionaire named Glenn Straub, had set that coming Wednesday–about 48 hours in the future–as the deadline for what’s been described as a grand reopening, a “soft” opening, a “real soft” opening and a “flaccid” flop (the local press corps has some bros in it). Which made Bill’s neighborhood once again a subject of some media interest. Bill, who’d worked as a banquet waiter at the Golden Nugget back in the 80s, had lived with his family in the Inlet since the early 1990s, and had been in his house well over a decade when work began on the gargantuan Revel, and the South Inlet was turned into the biggest construction site New Jersey.

More about: Atlantic City, casino, Glenn Straub, rebuilding atlantic city, redevelopment, Revel, sewerage, South Inlet