Another Atlantic City Casino Closing

[From article]
Atlantic City is a graveyard, and the Taj Mahal—conveniently located a few yards east of a funeral parlor—is next in line to be buried, the fifth Atlantic City casino to close in the last year.
It was already half-dead when I arrived here Thursday evening.
On Monday, Trump Entertainment Resorts announced that ahead of the tentative Dec. 12 date of the assisted suicide, one of two hotel towers, the Chairman’s Tower, had been shut down, and the casino would no longer be issuing credit.
[. . .]
Incorporated in 1894, the boardwalk and the beach were initially Atlantic City’s main attraction, and it became a popular resort town for middle-class families and the sort of place people aspired to retire to.
[. . .]
There is no one definitive reason for the city’s first decline: It was the age of the automobile and then plane, since most traveled to the boardwalk by train; or it was air conditioning, which made going to the beach less of a necessity for people in cities like Philadelphia; or it was the out-of-date hotels, which so embarrassed the city during the Democratic National Convention in 1964.
[. . .]
Atlantic City would not look up again until Gov. Brendan Byrne legalized gambling in 1976, ushering in a second boom so great that when the Taj Mahal opened, casinos were bringing in profits of $3 billion a year.
But the boom was uneven, at best. The area surrounding the casinos was largely forgotten. Notoriously, Atlantic City did not get its first supermarket until 1996. Politicians, Simon wrote in Boardwalk of Dreams, “repeatedly reassigned ‘Mickey Mouse cops,’ police who had, one journalist observed, ‘misbehaved’ in other parts of town, to the neighborhood” in the south side of town. Atlantic City was plagued by prostitution, crime, and, of course, addiction.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/08/i-watched-a-casino-kill-itself-the-awful-last-nights-of-atlantic-city-s-taj-mahal.html

SNAKE EYES12.08.14
I Watched a Casino Kill Itself: The Awful Last Nights of Atlantic City’s Taj Mahal
Olivia Nuzzi