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 TM
Catching the Next Wave at Atlantic City
New Hotels and Restaurants are Transforming
this
City-by-the-Sea
By Stephen Henderson
Fresh off the bus, I spot a dignified woman carrying a
bed cushion, sheathed in a bright pink pillowcase. The large tag on a
rolling suitcase identifies her simply as “MOM.” Then, three Goth-types
walk by. The men both wear leather pants and trade swigs of hard liquor.
They pass the bottle to young woman whose eyes are encircled with black
rings of make-up. It is 1:00 p.m., and I’m not sure if it’s more disturbing
that MOM is ready for bed, or that this trio of Draculas has been up all
night. Welcome to Atlantic City!
Officially touted as “America’s favorite playground,”
Atlantic City (or “A.C.” as residents calls it) is equally famous for being
America’s favorite freak show. It is the day-tripper’s delight because no
one is intimidated by the place and everyone feels loved just the way they
are. In fact, as the 25th anniversary of casinos arriving here was
celebrated last year (Resorts International, the first, opened in 1978), if
you have a dollar and a delusion, A.C. welcomes you with open arms.
Or, are those open claws? Tremendous changes are
underway here, yet most involve ways to rake still more cash from your
wallet. Atlantic City has finally wised up to how money is minted by Las
Vegas, its high-living cousin out west. According to a recent study
conducted by the Rutgers University School of Business, while both cities
net just over four billion in annual “gaming revenues” – no one calls it
gambling in these parts -- Las Vegas (where an average stay is three days),
tops that off with an additional two billion in hotel bills, restaurant
meals, and show tickets. With the typical visit to Atlantic City lasting
half as long, its non-gaming income languishes by comparison.
So, to foster increased hospitality – and increased
expenditures by guests -- casino hotels throughout Atlantic City are
sprucing up and exploiting their seaside locales. Tropicana is nearing
completion of a $225 million expansion project to add more rooms, a spa and
an entertainment complex. Showboat and Resorts are also building massive
new towers. Just this summer, outdoor bars opened in front of Trump, Hilton
and Caesar’s, where you can now get a drink on the beach. With live music
every evening, and celebrity drop-ins like Bruce Willis, it’s a happening
scene at sunset.
 Rest assured, you can still buy funnel cake and salt
water taffy. Three-wheeled gondolas still roll on the Boardwalk and
(despite lackluster support from the business community), the Miss America
Pageant will return next September. Yet, more change is inevitable. The
stakes have been raised, you see, by the just-opened Borgata Hotel and Spa,
Atlantic City’s first new casino in thirteen years and, by far, the
swankiest. Sheathed in curving planes of golden glass, it shimmers on the
city’s far horizon, looking like a tall pile of coins at the rainbow’s end.
Some Like it Haute
“Would you like a Borgata Card?” The pretty
receptionist asks when I checked in here a few weeks ago. Behind her head
is a silent waterfall, upon which plays a psychedelic light show: orange to
red to purple to green. “It keeps track of your winnings,” she explains.
“The more you spend, the more you can earn to buy drinks and stuff.”
Confused by the circularity of this sales pitch – in a
casino, “spending” means losing, right? -- I step onto the wrong elevator,
which rockets upwards. A video monitor installed in the elevator’s cabin is
showing “Moulin Rouge,” with Nicole Kidman purring her way through “Diamonds
are a Girl’s Best Friend.” A good tune for this joint, I think, as Borgata,
with its flattering lighting, marble floors, rich drapes and carpeting is
cleverly designed to confuse affection with acquisition.
Once in my hotel room – which is opulently, if
neutrally, decorated in white, cream and beige – I look out the window.
Nearby is Harrah’s, which has just added a new tower, and Trump’s Marina,
which recently opened its Eden Lounge, an enormous bar with jumbo-sized
furniture, wrought-iron trees, and bartenders who toss bottles about a là
Tom Cruise in “Cocktail.” Borgata is located in a part of Atlantic City
once known as the Marina, but now grandiloquently dubbed Renaissance Point.
Presumably, this new name is meant to imply that the Boardwalk’s hotels, a
mile or so away, are medieval in their comforts.
Donald Trump, for one, welcomes the competition. In a
recent interview, he was quoted a saying, “A phenomenon is taking place in
that the crowd is getting younger, so hotels need to change to meet demand.
The Borgata is a good thing for Atlantic City.”
With 43 floors and just over 2,000 rooms, Borgata is
Atlantic City’s largest hotel – it’s also the tallest building in the state
of New Jersey. Circulating through its vast casino are cocktail waitresses
dressed in sleek minidresses designed by Zac Posen, fashion’s couturier du
jour. These women are referred to as “Borgata Babes.”
I’d heard that the casino boasted $1,000 a pop slot
machines, so I asked one of the “babes” for directions. In a half hour of
standing outside a roped-off area where two scowling guys were at play, I
didn’t see them – or anyone else, for that matter – win. Or, so I thought.
Only later do I learn that Borgata is Atlantic City’s first “coinless”
casino. Winnings are noted on a bar-coded voucher, redeemable at the
cashier’s office.
I wonder about this. Though I’ve never gambled…uh,
gamed…even a nickel in my life, I instinctively understand the appeal of
money surging forth at my (Midas) touch. Then, again, maybe I’d feel like a
yokel hauling a plastic bucket of quarters past Dale Chihuly’s fantastic
glass sculptures which hang everywhere. Some look like enormous candies
wrapped in clear cellophane; others resemble a writhing mass of
phosphorescent snakes.
No coin buckets, though, isn’t the half of it. Since
the hotel’s credo is that “high rollers and strollers don’t mix,” only hotel
guests, not “day-trippers,” are allowed to enter with children who are
younger than 16. Management had hoped to also instate some sort of dress
code at its 11 restaurants, but this proved unfeasible. Anything remotely
unfashionable apparently irks Robert L. Boughner, CEO of Borgata, who said
he strived to create an ambiance that is “edgy, maybe even a little bit
naughty.”
Being Spoiled, and Loving It
 What Boughner means by “naughty” is obvious at Mixx, a
restaurant that morphs into a discotheque late at night. Entrees here are
given risqué names like “Thai me Up,” Asian erotica hangs on the walls, and
VIP rooms above the dance floor (yours for $1,000 a night) have suggestively
dim lighting and deep couches. At The Gypsy Bar, which boasts 70 types of
tequila, a bartender brags about what a bacchanal the place is ‘round
midnight: “Someone is always up on a table dancing, or has their head on the
bar with a margarita being dumped down their throat.”
I’m torn. Though this sounds edifying, there’s a
“Sexiest Couple and Wet T-shirt Contest” being held at an Atlantic City
night spot called Club Tru ($2 cover with “European ID,” the ad
proclaims.). While weighing these possibilities, I visit the gym – which
has row upon row of gleaming chrome dumbbells -- and Toccare, the sumptuous,
50,000 square-foot spa with a black marble sauna, steam and Jacuzzi area.
Eileen Hughes, an aesthetician, first rubs me down with
a pumice of grape seeds. Next, I soak in a seaweed salt tub while my face
is swabbed with a “detoxifying” paste made from green tea. Following a
massage with Rosemary extract, I feel so relaxed, I’m close to tears. Are
any of Atlantic City’s other hotel spas this nice, I ask, as she’d earlier
told me she’d worked at Bally’s, Tropicana and Caesar’s. “Not at all,”
Hughes says, after snorting with laughter. “But, if they are going to
survive, they’ll have to at least try.”
 In my robe and slippers, I pad next door to Shaving
Grace, a men’s grooming salon run by the four Sgarra brothers, from
Philadelphia. While Frank Sinatra croons about flying to the moon, Rich
Sgarra offers more earthy advice while shaving my face with a gleaming,
straight-edged razor. “A really close shave keeps a man looking young,” he
practically whispers, “’cause it slices off the dead skin.” I’m in no
position to argue.
 That night, after a cocktail at Ombra, a cellar bar
with 14,000 bottles of wine on display, I eat dinner at Suilan, where I
allow my pleasantly efficient waitress, Patricia Chiu, who was born in Hong
Kong, to dictate a menu and wine selections. This includes something called
“Chrysanthemum  Shark Skin Soup,” Baby Lamb with eggplant, and an order of
crab cakes. These latter are perfect spheres, crispy as a French baguette,
but moist and incredibly flavorful on the inside. Dear readers, I know
these are fighting words, but Suilan’s crab cakes are by far the best I’ve
ever eaten.
As I wipe my lip on a Frette napkin and sip Chan Yu, a
1997 Cabernet Sauvignon imported from China (who knew?), I imagine I could
be many places – New York, Peking, Paris -- but not Atlantic City.
A Dip into the Past
After a run the next morning, I have lunch at Gardner’s
Basin, a sleepy backwater at the end of New Hampshire Avenue where, starting
in the 1850’s, Atlantic City’s first hotels were built. There are old “Rum
Runners” houses built out over the water during the Prohibition era, so
boats filled with cases of alcohol could secretly off-load underneath. The
Flying Cloud is a famous seafood restaurant here; The Back Bay Ale House, a
newer addition. At both, reggae music plays at a pleasantly mellow volume.
Clamming boats chug out of the harbor, headed forth in search of Quahog
clams, and yachts-for-hire embark for “The Canyon,” a spot 95 miles offshore
where America’s continental shelf drops into a deep sea fisher’s paradise.
I wander about, squinting happily up at the sunny
skies. While it’s easy to forget the delicate ecosystem here, each year,
Atlantic City witnesses the migration of snow geese, hawks, sand pipers and
other shore birds. They stop off here to feast on the hatched eggs of Horse
Shoe crabs. I’m procrastinating, paying rather more attention than
necessary to the sweetly low-tech exhibits at The Ocean Life Center, because
after being pampered at Borgata, I am about to subject myself in the
Boardwalk’s bare knuckles. At this moment, I recall my barber’s advice: to
stay young, scrape your skin. Well, alrighty then. Off I go.
In “Atlantic City: 125 Years of Ocean Madness,” (1979,
Ten Speed Press) historians Vicki Gold Levi and Lee Eisenberg describe the
five stages between 1870 and 1896, during which the Boardwalk grew from a
narrow wooden sidewalk, to the present size of forty feet wide and four
miles long – the world’s biggest. Their book is filled with priceless
pictures of everything from the Heinz Pier, where free pickles were given
away for decades, to the Steeplechase Pier, which featured oddities such as
boxing matches between midgets, or the Hilton Sisters, Siamese-twin
performers from the 1930’s.
These days, eccentric tastes are still indulged, but
inside the air-conditioned casinos. After I check in to the Tropicana
Hotel, for instance, I meet Blanche the singing bartender, who belts out
show tunes while serving up drinks. Waitresses stomp about on stilts, one
being a multi-pierced drag queen whose long nails are encrusted with
rhinestones. A live chicken housed in a glass box regularly beats all human
opponents in a game of computerized Tic-Tac-Toe. And, inside a clear sphere
called The Fortune Dome, a man waves a net about, frantically trying to
catch dollars bills that are whirling about him in a cyclone.
When it opens next March, the Tropicana’s Latin Quarter
promises still more hilarity by recapturing the gaiety of pre-Castro
Havana. Part of the allure will be a stage show featuring topless women –
old news perhaps in Las Vegas, but a first for Atlantic City. “There’s
something incredibly sexy about that era,” says Maureen Siman, a Tropicana
spokesperson. “Back then, in the 30’s and 40’s, people would dance salsa in
the sand.”
A Boogie Down the Boardwalk
Block to block (or state-by-state, as each thoroughfare
intersecting the Boardwalk is named for one of the United States’ fifty),
you can feel the convulsions between Atlantic City’s past and future, the
chic and shabby. Case in point: the famed Atlantic City Convention Hall,
recently restored to its 1929 opening day splendor when it was the largest
and grandest assembly hall on earth, is now home to the Boardwalk Bullies,
an ice hockey team.
I enter Bally’s in search of The Blue Martini, a new
circular bar, where one can choose from over 100 martini recipes while
sitting at a counter made from smoking dry ice. I order the eponymous
elixir – made from Stoli Razberri, Blue Curacao and a twist of lemon – and
feel heroically hip, if $9.00 poorer.
Outside again, I stroll past gift shops selling
trinkets in gloriously bad taste (breast-shaped coffee mugs, anyone?), raw
bars so dingy the oysters appear to be served with a side order of ptomaine,
and dimly-lit storefronts where sullen women named Miss Liza or Teena lurk
behind gold lame curtains, waiting to read palms.
At Caesar’s new Temple Bar, a ceiling mural depicts
suspiciously 21st century-looking “Romans” cavorting in an orgy of grapes
and rose petals. I overhear two young emperors-to-be debating the merits of
a $200 half bottle of California Merlot. “At the end of the day, it’s
really just grapes,” one concludes with great solemnity.
Tempus Fugit. Eventually, I end up at Opa Bar &
Grille, the Boardwalk’s newest restaurant, at the corner of Indiana Avenue.
Its snazzy front rolls up like a huge garage door, and to my mind, the best
seats are at a tall counter which faces the ocean. While I eat excellent
seafood pasta with “blistered tomatoes” and saffron broth, I watch the
passersby. A group of adolescent boys do a bang-up job playing empty
containers of sheetrock compound. Girls in bikinis amble along munching
cotton candy with one hand, clutching packs of cigarettes and cell phones to
their ear with the other. An old, old lady carefully touches up the polish
on her poodle’s toenails.
It occurs to me that despite Atlantic City’s current
attempts at sophistication, this frightful and fabulous parade will always
be the town’s chief charm.
The Tide Rolls Out
I have an opportunity to reconsider this notion,
though, when on my way out of town the following morning, I see a man asleep
outside the bus station. In one hand, he clutches both a bottle of Excedrin
and a thick wad of cash. Judging from the grime on his pants, it seemed
obvious he’d slept right in this spot, rather than lavishing whatever he’d
won (assuming he did win) on a King-sized bed -- not to mention grape seed
massages or seafood pasta with blistered tomatoes. Yet, nearly above the
sleeping man’s head, construction derricks are swinging, and concrete gushes
forth, laying the foundation for still more castles in the sand.
Herein lies the huge gamble Atlantic City is taking.
High rollers like the high life, so it’s the Borgata babes for them. But,
will all these new hotel rooms being built sit vacant if the town’s average
visitor continues to be a day tripper who prefers to play penny ante?
I have an opportunity to reconsider this notion,
though, when on my way out of town the next morning, I see a man asleep
outside the bus station. In one hand, he clutches a bottle of Excedrin and
a thick wad of cash. Judging from the grime on his clothes, it seems he'd
spent the night at this spot, rather than lavishing his bankroll on a
king-sized bed and a grape-seed massage.
Nearly above the slumbering man's head, construction
derricks are swinging, and concrete gushes forth, laying the foundation for
more castles in the sand.
And therein lies the high-stakes gamble for Atlantic
City as it attempts to reinvent itself. Will the Borgata and all these new
hotel rooms attract big numbers of big spenders, or will this town continue
to be the preferred destination for bus-riding day-trippers who prefer penny
ante?
When You Go
Getting There: Atlantic City is a two and a half hour
drive from Baltimore, via I-95 North, the New Jersey Turnpike North, and the
Atlantic City Expressway East. Greyhound busses (800-231-222) arrive from
Baltimore at Michigan and Altantic Avenues in Atlantic City, and are $49
round-trip.
Lodging:
Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa
1 Borgata Way, Atlantic City, NJ 08401
866-692-6742
www.theborgata.com
Atlantic City’s latest and greatest. Deluxe décor, 11
restaurants, and “naughty” nightlife. Rooms start at $179.
Tropicana Casino and Resort
Brighton and the Boardwalk
800-843-8767
www.tropicana.net
Oceans views, indoor and outdoor pools, tennis courts,
health club, singing bartenders, and a tic-tac-toe playing chicken.
Squawk! Rooms start at $150.
Dining:
Suilan
Borgata Hotel
866-692-6742
A fusion of traditional Asian fare with fine French cuisine.
Entrees start at $22.95
Back Bay Ale House
800 N. New Hampshire Avenue
609-449-0006
Seafood and steaks, cooked up in a “coastal simple” style. Entrees start at
$11.75
Opa Bar and Grille
1743 Boardwalk (at Indiana Avenue)
609-344-0094
Italian and Greek specialties, and prime Boardwalk gawking.
Entrees start at $14.95
Activities:
Miss America Pageant, Saturday, September 20,
Atlantic City’s Historic Boardwalk Hall. Tickets are $40, and are available
at www.ticketmaster.com
Spa Toccare – Borgata Hotel, 609-317-7555
Soak, relax, rejuvenate. Treatments start at $65.
The Comedy Stop – Tropicana Hotel 609-340-4020
A.C.’s famed comedy club (where Rosie O’Donnell
and Ray Romano got their start.) Laugh till it hurts, at $50 per person
Steel Pier
Virginia Avenue and the Boardwalk,
Family entertainment and rides for kids of all ages.
609-898-7645
www.steelpier.com
Absecon Light House
31 S. Rhode Island Avenues
609-449-1360
New Jersey’s tallest lighthouse is 145 years young. Breathtaking views.
B& K Bike Rentals
(available in front of the Resorts, Caesars’ and Hilton Hotels)
609-344-8008
From 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. you can pedal the length of the Boardwalk
Suggested Reading:
The Last Good Time by Jonathan Van Meter (Crown,
2003). An engrossing portrait of Skinny D’Amato, creator of the 500 Club,
an infamous Atlantic City nightspot popular with “Rat Packers” Dean Martin,
Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra.
A Perfect Day
9:00 a.m.: Wake up, and wander down to the Borgata’s
Spa Toccare. What’ll it be – a Shiatsu massage, or a “wine and roses” soak?
12:00 noon: Lunch at the White House Sub Shop on Artic
Avenue. These sandwiches are world-famous, so go ahead, let your eyes be
bigger than your stomach.
2:00 p.m.: Work off that extra provolone you just ate
by climbing the 227 steps of the Absecon Lighthouse.
3:30 p.m.: Wander up the Boardwalk… or have a strong
teenager push you in a three-wheeled gondola.
5:00 p.m.: Listen to live jazz at “Chicken Bone”
beach, directly in front of Boardwalk Hall.
6:00 p.m.: Drink a Frozen Mojito from The Beach Bar at
Trump Plaza
8:00 p.m.: Return to The Borgata, and have crab cakes
at Sui Lan, or a $47 Kobe Beef hamburger at the Old Homestead Steak house.
10:00 p.m.: Feeling lucky? The BORGATA HAS 3,650 slot
machines waiting for you.
Atlantic City Hotels on Yahoo Travel
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