ATLANTIC CITY - When Revel made its glittering debut two
years ago, it was touted as bringing something unusual to this gambling town: a
casino within a luxurious "lifestyle" resort.
Its promise of glitz and prosperity is now dashed.
What becomes now of the 6.3 million-square-foot, glass
sheathed, 57-story building, which cost $2.4 billion to construct, and its
20-acre beachfront footprint on the northern end of the Atlantic City
Boardwalk?
Designed by Arquitectonica and BLT Architects, construction
of the building - the second tallest in the state behind the Goldman Sachs
tower in Jersey City - was fraught with setbacks:
Early in the construction process six key executives of the
company were killed in a charter-plane crash on their way to a meeting in
Minnesota regarding the glass to be used in the structure. A series of
construction accidents killed one man and severely injured at least four.
During a midpoint in construction, completion was delayed for about a year when
one of the partners quit.
What can be done now with the mega-structure that some have
termed a glass elephant - its 1,400 hotel rooms, its lobby of 650 steel cables
hanging from the ceiling with 19,000 dangling gold circles, its 5,000-seat
arena, 7,800 parking spaces, and 7,500 plumbing fixtures? Just how will its
30,000 live trees and plants, 10 swimming pools, and 1.04 million square feet
of facade glass - enough to cover 18 football fields - be dealt with?
Can they just board all that up? How many sheets of plywood
would that take?
Officials were mum on what's next for the structure. Even
usually loquacious Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian - who, two-and-a-half weeks
ago, called a news conference to say there were at least a half dozen potential
buyers for Revel - issued a terse statement Tuesday.
"This might be Revel's last chapter, but not the last
one for this building. My administration remains committed to the workers,
businesses, and visitors who are impacted by today's news," he said.
A spokeswoman for Guardian said later Tuesday that at the
moment the mayor didn't care to expound on what could happen to the building.
Liza Cartmell, executive director of the Atlantic City
Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes Atlantic City using $30 million a year
provided by the local casino industry, had even less to say.
"We're not comfortable speculating on what the
building(s) might be used for," Melanie Sole, a spokeswoman for Cartmell,
said in an e-mail.
Experts contended the Revel will be a hard sell.
"The milk has been spilled on this building. And
despite how it has been touted, Revel is really a good example of everything
that is actually bad about casinos," said Cape May architect Michael
Calafati.
"It's a hermetically sealed . . . big-box structure
that sort of sits on the Boardwalk and doesn't necessarily interact with what
is around it the way the former grand hotels of Atlantic City once did, like
the Dennis Hotel or later the Claridge," Calafati said.
His former Trenton-based firm Historic Building Architects
L.L.C. was hired in 2005 by the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority to
create a plan to preserve the Atlantic City Boardwalk's remaining landmarks.
While Robert J. Fahey Jr., Philadelphia-based executive vice
president of CBRE, a global commercial real estate firm, said there could be
life for the Revel after the lights go out next month he, too, said it will be
a hard sell.
"When you consider the aggregate size of the building .
. . hundreds and hundreds of hotel rooms and all those hotel rooms coming with
all that plumbing and all the issues that go with it," Fahey said.
"Some sort of housing might work . . . for senior housing, educational
facilities, and dormitories."
But the road ahead will be tough, he said.
"My advice is, they should just pray."
Source: Philly.com
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