Route 40 (https://rtforty.com/category/news/atlanticcity/)
News and information for Atlantic City residents and visitors.
In the South Jersey suburbs, people are turning to gardening to relieve lockdown boredom and produce the fresh food that is in short supply in local stores. But what can you do in an impoverished city that is already classed as a food desert and that suffers from flooding, soil contamination and other gardening hazards?
An offshore wind farm planned for Atlantic City’s coast is still waiting for approval. The wind farm would be the city’s second since a pioneering onshore project in 2005 started five turbines spinning to power a county wastewater treatment plant.
Gov. Phil Murphy in January signed an executive order designed to incentivize further the development of offshore wind farms in New Jersey, but companies interested in building an offshore wind farm are waiting to hear who will be allowed to do so. The rules have yet to move on from the desk of the state’s Board of Public Utilities.
The Hispanic Association of Atlantic County wants to know why the Atlantic City Board of Education plans to transfer the city’s first Latina principal to an elementary school, according to a letter sent by the Alliance to the board.
Abdullah Anderson Sr., who is 48, cuts hair five days a week at Omar and Abdullah’s Hair Bazaar at 1208 Atlantic Avenue. He opens his shop at six a.m. two days a week (the other three days he opens at eight), and he works until six or eight p.m. every day.
You’d be hard pressed to say it was a thriving Main Street, but the barbershop, Mexican restaurant, pizza place, tobacco store, mini-mart and even the closed-looking gift store are all open on the short span of Atlantic City’s Ventnor Ave, between Harrisburg and Trenton. In an age of dying malls and online shopping, something is working here.
Laurie Egrie is walking down the hallway of Sovereign Avenue School carrying a cardboard box filled with odd little balls and popsicle sticks with notelets stuck to them, and she’s wedged an easel-sized writing pad under one arm. The corridor is half dark. School let out 15 minutes ago.
It is still possible to buy discounted tickets to Atlantic City from the Port Authority bus terminal in New York. But you have to know where to look. Greyhound ended its discounted first-come, first-served policy for the Atlantic City-New York route on April 1. Now tourists and commuters using Greyhound buses have to buy tickets for specific departure times and dates, and the minimum cost of a round trip between the Port Authority and the Atlantic City bus terminal is $26. It is, however, still possible to get a discounted ticket if you select a specific casino to travel to and from.
Local nonprofit Skate AC broke ground Monday on a new skateboard park at the site of the old skate park at Sovereign Avenue and the bay.
Walt West of Uplift Solutions addressed (a partial gathering) of the Boardwalk Committee this a.m. to discuss the new supermarket coming to Baltic Avenue near Ohio, not far from the convention center. West said Uplift is looking to finalize RFPs by the end of April, after which they’ll move quickly to secure an operator and developer for a supermarket that will be 40,000 square feet total (30,000 square feet of active retail space) and employ about 125 people (80% part-time). He estimated it will take 18 months to build. Uplift will be holding townhalls on this important subject on March 21, April 11 and April 23 (details here). In answer to the important “loss-prevention” question that tends to arise when the subject of supermarkets come up in Atlantic City, West said there are “intelligent and effective ways to address that.”
The old Masonic Temple on Hartford Avenue in Chelsea is for sale, and has been for a while, per the big sign on the side of it.
In the 90s, the building was used as headquarters for the Atlantic City Police Department, when it was known as the “Temple of Doom.”
The photographer Brian Rose drove to Atlantic City in a Zip car from New York in November 2016, not long after the election. He started taking pictures around town with a Wanderlust Travelwide 4×5 camera to which he’d attached a 90mm Linhof lens, second-hand.
On an early visit, in the winter of 2017, he estimates, he set up in the South Inlet in the vicinity of Rhode Island Avenue and pointed his camera at the Revel casino.
