“I surfed right in front of this place as a kid,” he said. Mack, who was raised in nearby Margate, got a job at the Dover Downs casino in Delaware but jumped at the chance to return home. “You knew the end was coming and you had to find another job in Atlantic City, and there weren’t a lot of jobs there,” he said. George Mack was a casino shift manager at the Taj Mahal when it shut down, a day he recalled as “very gloomy.” “It’s never a dull moment at my table,” she said. Outgoing personalities and big smiles were high on the list of desired traits. Her spunky personality appeared to be just what Hard Rock was looking for in potential workers, some of whom sang, danced or just generally charmed interviewers.

I can’t wait to show them what I’ve got.” “But when one door closes, another opens, and Hard Rock is that door for me. “I remember praying, ‘Dear Lord, please let this stay open,'” she recalled.

10, 2016, as a depressing day she couldn’t believe was happening. Monica Weekes worked at the Taj Mahal since the day now-President Donald Trump, who was a real estate mogul at the time, opened it in 1990. WHYY thanks our sponsors - become a WHYY sponsor And it will be joined by another shuttered casino that’s reopening its doors this summer: The former Revel casino, which closed in 2014, will reopen as the Ocean Resort casino, adding thousands more jobs. The casino will create more than 3,000 jobs. “This is the first brush stroke of the renaissance,” said Matt Harkness, president of the Hard Rock, which plans to open this summer. Hard Rock plans additional job recruiting events in the coming weeks for people who applied online and did not necessarily work at the Taj Mahal. About 1,600 such workers were invited to apply for jobs, and 1,400 did.

But for many laid-off workers, the first step on the road to recovery started Tuesday, when the shuttered former Trump Taj Mahal casino began interviewing job applicants for its reincarnation this summer as a Hard Rock casino resort. Since 2014, casino closings eliminated 11,000 jobs and devastated the economy of the Atlantic City region. Thousands of Atlantic City casino jobs lost during a brutal three-year stretch when five casinos shut down are coming back.

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