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Facelift and feisty seagulls sure bets in Atlantic City
With three new hotel towers due to open, this will be the year traditional dowdy Atlantic City begins to take on a new and different look, though the seagulls legally will remain aggressive.
The Tropicana Casino and Resort this year will get a new owner.
“Work will pick up on a $2 billion casino, details on yet another new casino will be unveiled, and gambling halls may finally start to recover from the beating that out-of-state slots parlors put on them last year,” according to wire reports.
In an era of change, Atlantic City is trying to reinvent itself as a hipper national destination resort. It is also trying to fight off increasingly stiff competition from New York and Pennsylvania slots parlors.
The three new casino hotel towers will add another 2,500 rooms to a city where it can be difficult to book a room at a casino hotel on a weekend.
The Borgota Hotel Casino & Spa is opening its Water Club tower with 800 rooms. Harrah’s is opening a second tower with 941 rooms and the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort will be adding nearly 800 more rooms in its second tower.
The area’s only recent setback was a fire that burned the exterior façade along the roof of the Monte Carlo hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip. Fire officials say the 32-story, 3,213-room building will remain closed until work is completed on fixing the roof.
“If you want to stay there in the next few days, be sure to bring marshmallows,” said one local observer.
In less lofty news from Atlantic City, officials are scrapping plans for a seagull shield made of fishing wire strung over the Boardwalk to protect diners from hungry gulls.
Animal rights groups decried it and engineers said it might be risky, but business leaders in this gambling resort ultimately decided that the idea just wouldn’t work.
“We came to the conclusion that it would be a very, very difficult project to do on the Boardwalk,” said Don Guardian, executive director of the Atlantic City Special Improvement District, which floated the idea last month.
Boardwalk business groups now plan to address the problem by installing dome-shaped covers over garbage cans, erecting “Don’t Feed The Seagulls” signs and asking the city to enforce an ordinance already on its books that calls for $50 fines for people who feed the pesky birds.
Report by David Wilkening
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