Route 40 (https://rtforty.com/prominence/top-story/)
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On a recent afternoon, Friday before the Super Bowl, a group of workers at the Atlantic City Contact Center stood in a low-ceilinged office in a corner of The Claridge’s parking garage. The place smelled of onions and pasta salad.
Street flooding in Atlantic City has never been so bad, according to fire chief Scott Evans. Evans and others are working on a plan they hope will help the city tackle some flooding by raising houses, improving bulkheads and installing stormwater pumps. The “Atlantic City Floodplain Management Plan”, unveiled at a public meeting earlier this month, is designed to help city residents qualify for a bigger discount on flood insurance premiums.
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.
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.
Businesses and other organizations in Atlantic County are offering to help workers who have been furloughed because of the government shutdown. Here is a list of current offers for workers and places where members of the public can donate food.
Billionaire investor Carl Icahn appears to be getting ready to sell his remaining Atlantic City property, the Trump Plaza. An Icahn-backed company, IEP AC Plaza, recently paid $3 million for the deed to the long-shuttered casino, according to property documents filed in December. (You can have a look at the docs here and h/t to Reuben Kremer for his ceaseless monitoring of the property records).
Icahn’s conglomerate Icahn Enterprises took control of the Trump Plaza and Trump Taj Mahal when the previous owner, Trump Entertainment Resorts, entered bankruptcy in 2014. Icahn sold the Taj Mahal to a consortium of local investors and Hard Rock International in 2017. But his attempts to sell the Plaza were stymied by the site’s ground lease, which was held by earlier investors and acted as a so-called poison pill to prevent the sale, according to the New York Post.
The Atlantic County Clerk’s Office has received over 15,000 mail-in ballot requests for the 2018 General Election and the record number is putting pressure on the clerk’s office to confirm signatures on the ballots.
Several voters told Route 40 their signature was rejected from a mail-in absentee ballot or an in-person mail-in ballot. There have been more rejections than usual because the number of mail-in ballots is so high, said Mike Sommers, deputy county clerk.
The great Trump Taj Mahal liquidation sale opened to the public at 10:00 a.m. on July 6, about eight months after the casino closed and 167 days after Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the president of the United States. History was very much the subtext of the Taj Mahal fire sale, which offered customers a chance at a piece of the Donald, recently assured of his own place in history. But since mid-February, the surname of the president has been scrubbed from the property under the terms of a deal between Donald and his friend and economic adviser, Carl Icahn, who until recently controlled the property. There were no TRUMP-branded artifacts for sale at the Taj.
A lot of shore towns have beach concerts, movies on the beach and bonfires. Street fairs are pretty common too. What’s more unusual? Finding dozens of homeowners willing to host parties, all on one day and on their porch. And making it happen.
Atlantic City will soon boast its first ever legal distillery, thanks to brothers Eric and Mark Ganter. The Little Water Distillery may not be the first to ever produce spirits in the city, but it will be the first to do so with federal and state licenses. The distillery, which began life as a family daydream after Eric and Mark’s dad received a still for his birthday in 2013, will launch an American whisky dubbed WHITECAP around December 15, just in time for those of us who failed to do all our holiday shopping this past weekend. The whisky is the result of a collaboration with a distillery in the Appalachian mountains that the Ganter brothers struck up a friendship with during their multi-year process to launch their Atlantic City site. The name is a play on the white caps of the mountains and the Atlantic ocean, Eric Ganter explained.