October 12, 2016

The End Of An Era: Atlantic City’s Trump Taj Mahal Closes Its Doors

Beginning with the closure of the Atlantic Club in January 2014, Atlantic City has seen the fat trimmed from its casino industry. The city has gone from 12 casino properties to just seven, following today’s closure of the Trump Taj Mahal.

The closure of Trump Taj Mahal is hitting people differently than the other four casinos that closed over the course of 2014 — Atlantic Club, Showboat, Trump Plaza, and Revel — due to the iconic nature of “The Taj,” which will forever hold a place in gambling history.

The Taj becomes an icon

Despite its persistent financial troubles, The Taj was the gambling destination on the East Coast for over a decade.

Its place in the pantheon of gambling destinations shouldn’t be overly surprising considering it was the first billion-dollar casino on the East Coast, and the only billion-dollar casino in Atlantic City for over a decade. Borgata, opened over a decade later, and just barely eclipsed the cost of the Trump Taj Mahal, coming in at a final cost of $1.1 billion.

In effect, The Taj was a Las Vegas Strip casino in Atlantic City.

The Taj poker room was the place to play poker, with poker players traveling from New York, Philadelphia, D.C. and Boston to grab a seat in the weekend games at The Taj. As popular as the poker room was, it was the movie Rounders that made The Taj poker room as well known in poker circles as the World Series of Poker, and really cemented its place in poker history.

The Taj tries to shoot the moon

As mentioned above, the beauty and impressiveness of the property hid Trump Taj Mahal’s big secret.

The casino was a financial disaster from the day it opened its doors in 1990, with only brief periods of prosperity in its two-and-a-half-decade history.

The Taj’s financial woes didn’t come about because the casino wasn’t busy, or because it was seen as lacking in any respect. The problem wasn’t execution; it was planning. The price tag to build it, and the interest rates on the bonds Donald Trump agreed to pay in order to get the necessary financing for the casino simply set the property up to fail. The Taj was doomed before it ever dealt a card or rolled a dice.

As Politifact has reported:

“He [Donald Trump] funded the construction of the $1 billion Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, N.J., which opened in 1990, primarily with junk bonds at a whopping 14 percent interest. A year later, the casino was nearly $3 billion in debt, while Trump had racked up nearly $900 million in personal liabilities.”

In 1991, Trump Taj Mahal filed for the first of what would eventually be four bankruptcies:
  • The second bankruptcy occurred in 2004 (Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts);
  • The third in 2009 (Trump Entertainment Resorts);
  • The fourth in 2014 (Trump Entertainment Resorts).
Trump’s personal interest in the casino was reduced from 47 percent to 27 percent following the 2004 bankruptcy, and to just 10 percent following the 2009 bankruptcy. His name remained on the side of the building but Donald Trump had been ousted as the chairman and lost control of operations following the 2009 bankruptcy.

Carl Icahn took control of the casino this year, and promised a $100 million investment in the property that many thought would breathe new life into the once opulent casino that had fallen into an extreme state of disrepair.

Icahn had recently turned around the Tropicana in Atlantic City, but a labor dispute resulted in a month-long strike, and with North Jersey casinos at least a possibility, Icahn decided to pull the plug and cut his losses.

Closure of the Taj Mahal may not be the end

Atlantic City’s capacity to support 12 casino properties was an open question well before neighboring states got into the casino business.

Once casinos started popping up on all sides of New Jersey, the question being asked wasn’t if Atlantic City could support 12 casino properties. Rather, it was “how many casinos need to close in order for Atlantic City’s casino industry to right-size itself?”

The current number of operational casinos in Atlantic City is seven. Developer Glenn Straub is trying to reopen Revel (which has been rebranded to TEN), which would bring the number of operational casinos in Atlantic City back up to eight. That may or may not be a viable number.

Some analysts think the market could support as many as eight casinos depending on other circumstances in the city and beyond. Others feel the proper number is no more than five or six casino properties, and even less if casinos are built in the northern part of the state in the coming years.

What happens next?

What happens to these shuttered casino properties will dictate the future of the once popular resort town.

Showboat has been green-lighted to reopen as a non-gaming hotel. If Trump Plaza, Atlantic Club, and Trump Taj Mahal can be repurposed in somewhat similar ways, it could be a boon for the city and its remaining casinos, all of which have seen operating profits rise since the 2014 casino contraction.

There are any number of uses for these massive properties:

They could be:
  • converted to housing;
  • turned into a non-gaming entertainment complex;
  • turned into shopping malls with retail and dining options.
  • The key is finding a way to repurpose these buildings so they’re not an eyesore on the Atlantic City skyline, or a depressing reminder of the city’s lost glory.

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