Harrah’s is undertaking a massive renovation of one of the city’s historic gambling halls. From the AC Press:
Acknowledging that the cowboy concept has gone stale, Bally’s Wild Wild West Casino is preparing for a $1.5 million facelift to reinvigorate the aging casino just in time for the bustling summer crowds.
…Bally's spent $110 million to build the Wild Wild West annex in 1997. The extravagant re-creation of the Wild West gave Atlantic City its first themed casino. Its whimsical surroundings were a welcome diversion from the drab casino floors prevalent in those days.
However, over the years, the casino has become woefully outdated. The robot-like, animatronic characters at Bally's Wild Wild West Casino have broken down, and there is no one around with the expertise to bring them back to life.So the grizzled prospector and his trusty old pack mule have stopped panning for gold. The talking vulture perched on a cactus has gone mute. The gunslingers no longer fire their six-shooters and Winchesters.The rest of the Old West-themed gaming hall seems a bit dead, too.
“It's a little old-fashioned,” Harry Gordon, a gambling customer from Toms River, said while gazing out at the landscape of faux canyons, fake waterfalls and pseudo frontier-town stores. “I would like to see improvements.”
Bally's parent company Harrah's Entertainment Inc. has toyed with the idea of getting rid of the Wild Wild West to make way for a new hotel tower and other attractions.For now, the western decor will stay. Customers are supposed to be captivated by a fake 1880s frontier mining town blended with high-tech lighting, sound and entertainment effects.Popular attractions included the animatronic people and animals that once came to life – talking, singing and gunslinging. As his pack mule brayed, the prospector would speak to customers while he panned for gold at the base of a mountain waterfall. A robotic vulture bobbed his head and talked from his cactus perch. At Lillie Mae's Social Club bordello, two animatronic call girls beckoned customers from a balcony overlooking the casino floor.
Now those characters are still. Domenico said that most of the robots simply wore out over the years and have stopped working. The company that installed them in 1997 has since gone out of business and there is no one available to make repairs, he said.
Technically I guess everything is aging, but only in the casino industry would you describe something built barely 13 years ago as “aging.”
The thing about the animatronic robots breaking and being able to be repaired isn’t just a Harrah’s thing. It happened to Kamelion, a robotic Doctor Who companion of the 1980s, which was cutting edge technology at the time. Unfortunately, it’s inventor/operator died suddenly without letting anyone else know how to operate the complicated machine.
There’s really not much excuse for letting the vultures, etc fall into disrepair these days, though, since there is probably some engineer who will repair them–for a price. Sam’s Town doesn’t have any problem keeping its animatronic animals up and running.
As far as the bigger picture goes, outside of the mechanical bull and the stage, I’m not sure how much $1.5 million is going to buy for a makeover. And I’d love to see the proposal to tear down a $110 million building after 13 years to build another hotel tower at a time when visitation is dropping steadily.
The live music, though, is undeniably a good thing. It sounds like they’re on the right track.