Up the Atlantic City, N.J., boardwalk from the Trump Taj Mahal looms a $2.4 billion monument to grandiose dreams falling to grim realities, Bloomberg reported today. In a place inured to booms and busts, nothing has failed more spectacularly than Revel, the deepest money pit that Atlantic City has ever seen. Initially financed by Morgan Stanley, the immense hotel-casino opened in 2012, with Beyoncé as its headliner. It closed two years later after two trips to bankruptcy court, which is why what is happening now just off Oriental Avenue might seem so surprising. As Atlantic City itself teeters on the financial precipice, once again a brash outsider is promising that Revel will transform the landscape. Florida entrepreneur Glenn Straub wants to turn Revel around, and he’s offered up some pretty wild schemes to do it: a polo club, with the ponies stabled in the parking garage; water parks and rope courses; an indoor ski run; a cryotherapy chamber; a university that he has called a "tower of geniuses" to explore pressing world problems like nuclear waste disposal. The blackjack tables and roulette wheels will come later, he says. A bankruptcy judge let him buy the place, all 6.3 million square feet of it, for $82 million. The idea is to open part of the Revel as early as Wednesday, in what amounts to a soft launch.
