Atlantic City’s casino revenue was cut in half in less than a decade

This is what it looked like on the boardwalk on Wednesday. (Wayne Parry/AP)

One blunt fact seemed to sum up how poorly 2014 went for Atlantic City: A third of the former gambling haven’s casinos shut down last year.

Yet there is another figure that highlights just how severe the city’s larger downswing has been over the last decade. Since 2006, the revenues pulled in by casinos have fallen almost in half, according to figures released Wednesday by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement.

The $2.74 billion pulled in by the casinos last year was down slightly from the $2.87 billion they earned a year earlier. But it was incredibly down from the $5.21 billion the city’s casinos earned in 2006. The earnings in 2006, which at the time was just the latest in a decades-long string of record years for revenue, turned out instead to represent an apex that gets farther away each year, receding into memory and being replaced by bleak, grim reality.

Consider this: Between 1978 (the first year for which the state Division of Gaming Enforcement has made annual revenue reports available) and 2006, Atlantic City’s casinos never saw their annual revenues drop from the previous year. Since then, the casinos have endured eight consecutive years of declining revenue.

That is a dramatic turnaround, one that is playing out as slot machines along the boardwalk are going dark and roulette wheels packaged up. The decline in revenues occurred over a year that saw four of the city’s 12 casinos shut down, costing thousands of people their jobs. A fifth casino, Trump Taj Mahal, was also supposed to close in November, but it remains open due to a $20 million loan from Carl Icahn.

If you want to look at the glass as being half full, rather than simply halved from eight years ago, Matthew Levinson of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission pointed out that the surviving casinos actually saw growth last year.

So what happened to Atlantic City? Well, people along the Northeast Corridor no longer have to trek to Atlantic City if they want to gamble. In 2006, the same year Atlantic City saw its revenues peak, Pennsylvania opened its first casinos to great success; Maryland has also gotten into the casino business, while New York is considering expanding its casino ambitions.

Meanwhile, Atlantic City is contracting rather than expanding. Revel Casino Resort, which cost $2.4 billion and was touted as a resort destination in 2012, shuttered last September after posting big losses. It joined Showboat, the Atlantic Club and Trump Plaza as casinos vacating the boardwalk. It is unclear what will happen to Trump Taj Mahal and if it will remain open after a rough 2014. That casino’s revenue dropped 17 percent last year, falling to $215 million from $259 million a  year before.