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Showboat, Atlantic City

Showboat Casino, Atlantic City, 1987

Del Webb decided to take his trademark Sahara hotels to Atlantic City in 1980. His long-time architect, Martin Stern designed a Sahara Boardwalk Hotel as a modern streamlined, stylized showboat, which utilized a stepped tower with which he had experimented in his unrealized Las Vegas Xanadu project in 1976. When Webb’s Atlantic City project collapsed, Stern used the same design for Showboat Inc.’s new Boardwalk hotel which opened in1987. Harrah’s bought out its rival casino owner Showboat Inc. in 1998 and kept the Showboat name on this successful property, with an interior make-over in purple Mardi Gras, which had become Harrah’s national theme.

Aerial view of Showboat Hotel, 1987
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Showboat, Atlantic City