All of them serve food and drink up at Manhattan prices.īut there are highlights: The in-room coffee maker comes with real half-and-half. It’s surrounded by a number of restaurants, bars and clubs, all of them steeped in a perpetual evening din. Just beyond, the casino floor beeps and whistles like 10,000 R2-D2s drunk at a wedding. Just inside the entrance lies the first taste of the 13 elaborate class chandeliers by Dale Chihuly that dominate the public areas–both intriguing and appalling, they are the Kardashians of light fixtures, which I mean in the best possible way. My presence here makes no sense within the megaresort’s particular logic.Īfter a Greyhound bus from New York City, and a ride on a smaller trolley, I arrive to the Borgata. I am there to research an article, and will do zero gambling, partying, or business-ing during my stay. It also seems to enjoy favored status with corporate conferences. The absurdity of its location aside, the Borgata enjoys its status as the current favorite Atlantic City hotel with young people who like to party. There’s only a moderate chance you’ll leave the building again before heading back to wherever it is you came from. From there, at some point, you’ll sleep in one of 2,000 rooms (or in one of the adjoining Water Club’s 800 rooms). More accurately, you are driving up to a marsh, where you then go from your vehicle into a calculated windowless world where all eyes inevitably turn toward the 161,000 square foot casino floor. On a technicality, you are going to Atlantic City when you visit the Borgata. Only people who care only about profit would ever build on a mammoth scale here-there’s no culture or enrichment or city improvement or even an exceptional landscape on the docket. Since the Borgata opened in 2003, outshining the previous two even as it mimicked them, the three mammoth hotel casinos have given the area its only reference points, aside from the marina itself. That would be our current president, former reality star and before that, a failed casino magnet, who opened the second casino in the Marina District in 1985, Trump Castle (the first was Harrah’s). Is it any wonder that this location has serious ties to a person who also happens to be entirely unfit for the spot he occupies? Never have I seen a hotel plunked down in a spot so completely unfit for one. Located in the city’s Marina District, which is not so much a district as a lonely marsh, the complex defies logic and understood notions of city planning.

Rolling up to the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City ranks as a strange-and discomfiting-example of the latter category.

Borgata hotel casino