Behind the Scenes of AC’s Tennessee Avenue Redevelopment

We took a tour of the work being done on the beach block of Tennessee Avenue in Atlantic City last week, to check out progress on buildings that will house three new businesses and a non-profit. The so-called Tennessee Avenue Renaissance Project consists of a dozen properties on the Inlet side of the street. The developers will be opening a coffee shop, a beer hall, a non-profit yoga studio and a chocolate bar in the first phase of the project this fall. The beer hall, named ‘The Ten’, is the largest space on the block, next to two vacant lots that will be transformed into an outdoor beer garden. A back room at the beer hall will feature pinball, pool tables and other games.

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Former Rodeway Inn Could See Revival As Affordable Housing

The Rodeway Inn along the Black Horse Pike in Egg Harbor Township could be revived as garden apartments and townhouses, according to a developer’s plan that will go before EHT’s planning board on Monday. Eastern Pacific Development is seeking preliminary site plan approval for an affordable housing project that would turn the existing 77-unit motel into one-and two-bedroom garden apartments. Nine additional townhouses with two- and three- bedroom units would also be built, according to the planning board agenda. The developer is also proposing to demolish an existing office building on the site and add a children’s play area and a community area. “There’s a significant need for affordable housing right now,” said Hans Alpert, chief executive of Eastern Pacific Development.

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Camp Revel

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.

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