Caesars closed its profitable Showboat casino, then barred its return

Showboat opened on the Atlantic City boardwalk on 30 March 1987 as a Mardi Gras-themed riverboat casino — bowling alley, Bourbon Tower suites with oceanfront balconies. Caesars Entertainment, which had operated the property for 16 of its 27 years, was still making money from it in 2014. The market around it was not: Atlantic City revenue was plunging as neighbouring states opened their own casinos.

Caesars decided the city had too many casinos and its portfolio would earn more with fewer. On 31 August 2014 Showboat stopped admitting customers at 3 p.m. and shut its doors at 4 — still profitable, with more than 2,000 workers, of whom only some 470 were transferred to other Caesars properties. Revel closed the next day, Trump Plaza in mid-September; that summer nearly 8,000 Atlantic City casino workers lost their jobs.

Then Caesars made the closure permanent in a second sense: before selling the property to Stockton University for $18 million in December 2014, it placed a deed restriction barring casino gaming at the site for ten years, shielding its remaining Bally's property next door. A cook who had worked there summed up the staff mood: 'We're still profitable. We still don't understand why we were the one targeted to close.'