“This is akin to having a steel mill town and the steel mill shuts down.”īusinesses that indirectly depend on the industry - restaurants, hotels and shore rentals - are suffering as well, potentially costing thousands more jobs. Nothing even comes close,” said Bob McDevitt, president of UNITE HERE Local 54, the casino workers’ union.

Most of the 27,000 people employed by the city’s casinos are out of work, many of whom live in the city, which has a 38-percent poverty rate. So, too, has the construction of an aviation technology park at the Atlantic City International Airport.Ībout a third of the workers in the Atlantic City area are employed in the leisure and hospitality industry, compared to about a tenth of the workforce statewide. A planned expansion of Stockton’s campus in Atlantic City, a sign of hope the city could someday be less reliant on the volatile gaming industry, has been put on hold.

The casinos have been closed for more than a month.

Even if the virus doesn’t hit the area as hard as it has in North Jersey, the economic disaster for Atlantic City looks even more pronounced, and could reverberate long after the virus subsides. “We have the potential of an Armageddon in Atlantic City,” George Tibbitt, the president of the City Council, said in an interview.Ītlantic City and its suburbs - along with much of southern New Jersey - has been spared the worst of the coronavirus infections that have devastated the northern and central parts of the state and neighboring New York, with 964 cases and 41 deaths reported since early March.īut local leaders and economic analysts aren’t taking much comfort in that.

Now there are likely more dark years to come. But, unlike in some other tourist destinations, Atlantic City was in a rough position to begin with. Like in Las Vegas - in cities across the nation that have been similarly devastated by virus-induced lockdown - the damage has been severe and immediate. Phil Murphy ordered all casinos closed and all major events canceled, a near complete shutdown of the city’s economy.

Atlantic city casinos on the boardwalk