Five days out from the reopening of the vaunted place formerly known as Revel, and you might imagine there would be a frenzy of activity around the multiblock, Boardwalk-front in Atlantic City, N.J., but no one was scrubbing the exterior of the lavishly designed structure, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported yesterday. The hundreds of huge windows on the building still appear caked with salt and grime, and the metal poles of the light standards ringing the exterior are covered in rust, giving the place a desolate, rather ramshackle appearance. There were no trucks arriving with supplies, nor employees bustling about readying the 900 hotel rooms that are supposed to be available Wednesday when the resort has a "soft" reopening. Instead on Friday, a sparse construction crew tackling the installation of a rope-climbing course and a zip-line ride in the resort's former porte cochere appeared to be the only work happening at the 20-acre site. A lone maid could be seen inside the lobby mopping a section of the marble floor. Glenn Straub, who bought the $2.4 billion resort for pennies on the dollar at a bankruptcy court sale last year, walked around the site with a to-do list in hand still refusing to talk specifics on what the former Revel will be called or precisely what the theme of the resort will be. Although Atlantic City's fortunes as an East Coast gambling mecca have been on a downward spiral for several years, Revel's closure may be its most notorious financial failure to date.
