The Revel Casino Hotel was conceived in 2007, in the last year before the financial crisis, as Atlantic City's answer to Vegas. The Miami firm Arquitectonica designed the curving glass tower; BLT Architects served as architect of record; Tishman Realty - fresh off building the Borgata - managed construction. Morgan Stanley owned 90 percent of the project. Then the market collapsed. In April 2010, Morgan Stanley announced it would walk away from its $932 million investment, choosing to take the loss rather than throw more money into a stalled site on a struggling boardwalk. The project sat through 2010. In February 2011, Governor Chris Christie announced up to $261 million in state tax incentives as part of his Atlantic City revitalization plan. Two weeks later, Revel Entertainment Group closed a $1.15 billion financing package and resumed construction. The casino opened on April 2, 2012 - exactly twenty-two years to the day after the Trump Taj Mahal had opened on the same boardwalk.

Revel was beautiful, smoke-free, and almost immediately failing. The casino floor sat six stories above the beach, which gamblers disliked because they had to take elevators to get to the slots. A two-acre rooftop deck called Sky Garden featured 30,000 live trees and plants - an extravagance that delivered no revenue. The poker room closed in August 2013. The hotel lost $35 million in the second quarter of 2012 and another $37 million in the third. Credit downgrades came in waves. In November 2012, regulators were warned of a $1.3 billion debt load. The casino owed $12 million in unpaid property taxes. UNITE HERE Local 54 said Revel owed contractors $51 million. The first Chapter 11 filing came in February 2013, just ten months after opening. Revel's debt was reduced from $1.5 billion to $272 million by transferring equity to creditors. None of the $261 million in state tax incentives was ever paid out. The casino was supposed to break even by 2017. It did not make it past 2014.

Revel closed on September 2, 2014 - the third of four Atlantic City casinos to shut that year. What followed was one of the more peculiar real estate episodes in American gambling history. In April 2015, Florida polo magnate Glenn Straub bought the building for $82 million, a small fraction of its $2.4 billion construction cost. Then nothing. Straub fought with the city, with the engineers' union, with the sewerage company. In April 2015 the building sat twenty days without power or water until a federal judge intervened. The chief engineer resigned. Straub expelled nine union engineers in September 2015 and proposed retraining replacements through Siemens. By November the building was, as Straub's own attorney described in court, cold, dark and on the verge of suffering widespread property damage. Straub proposed, in turn: a water park, an equestrian center, a zip line, a rock climbing wall, three movie theaters, a heliport for high rollers. He renamed it TEN Atlantic City in September 2016. It never opened to the public.

In January 2018, Straub sold the building for $200 million to AC Ocean Walk, controlled by Denver developer Bruce Deifik. The new owners rebranded the property Ocean Resort Casino, partnered with William Hill for sports betting, joined Hyatt's Unbound Collection of unaffiliated hotels, and announced a summer reopening. On June 27, 2018 - the same day Hard Rock reopened the old Trump Taj Mahal next door - Ocean opened its doors. Within six months Deifik had sold the property to Luxor Capital Group, a New York hedge fund that had financed his purchase. In April 2019 the new owners renamed the property Ocean Casino Resort to emphasize gaming over the hotel. The Cove, a 7,450-square-foot high-limit slots area, opened in December 2020. In 2022, a $75 million project finally completed 460 guest rooms that had sat empty since original construction. A $50 million renovation was announced for 2025, including an eighteen-hole indoor mini-golf course.

From a small plane over the New Jersey coast at night, the Ocean tower is the brightest object south of New York City. The white sphere on its roof - the Pearl - contains LEDs that can be programmed in any color or pattern, and it glows over the dark Atlantic like a lighthouse for gamblers. During the Straub years, it sat dark; the night it was finally lit again on February 29, 2016, was supposed to herald a reopening that never came. Now it shines every night. The building has cost three different ownership groups north of $2.7 billion combined - more than the construction of the One World Trade Center observation deck, more than every spaceport in America. The casino floor is still six stories above the beach. The elevators still take longer than gamblers want. The boardwalk still runs past the front entrance. And every July, the Atlantic still rolls in indifferent to the fortunes won and lost on the top floor. The building did not break Atlantic City. It almost did. Now it stands - lit, open, on its third name - as a kind of monument to what the city was willing to bet on itself.