The Quarter at Tropicana opened in 2004 as a three-story indoor shopping street in Atlantic City, New Jersey, built to look like Old Havana. Shops outnumbered restaurants nearly three to one.
Aztar wanted people to have a reason to come in besides the casino, so it built the Quarter with no gaming at all. Brooks Brothers and Chico's took space on the new street in its first years.
Neither one is there now. In 2022 an Irish pub in the Quarter became a smokehouse, and a general store became a cocktail bar. A nightclub turned into a social hall the next year.
The Quarter is still open under Caesars. Its newer tenants are bars and restaurants with live music and comedy, and several of them keep the Quarter going late into the night.
Four city blocks, one Havana street
In August 2003, Tropicana's new hotel tower topped off at 31 stories above Atlantic City.
The tower was one piece of a plan Aztar Corporation had laid out in 2001: 502 more hotel rooms, a 2,400-space parking garage, and a 200,000-square-foot district of restaurants, shops, and nightlife to be leased to outside operators.
That district became the Quarter.
It formed an indoor street within Tropicana's four-block complex, three stories high, built to look like Old Havana in the 1940s.
The idea was to hold visitors beyond the casino floor and give people who hadn't come to play a reason to walk in at all.
Work had started on April 22, 2002, with the opening set for March 2004. Nearly two months before the tower topped off, a competitor opened.
Borgata arrived in the Marina District in July 2003 with 2,002 hotel rooms, nearly four times what Tropicana was adding.
Tropicana's casino revenue came under pressure while its own Havana Street was still a construction site.
The garage collapse of October 2003
On October 30, 2003, two months after the tower topped off, a concrete pour was underway on the eighth level of the new 10-story garage when the structure began to fail.
Part of the outside edge collapsed through five levels. Four construction workers lost their lives, and 21 were injured.
Investigators later traced the failure to improperly installed reinforcing steel and insufficient temporary support during construction.
The collapse reached straight into the resort that was already open.
Tropicana cleared about 600 hotel rooms and temporarily shut its existing garages as streets around the property were blocked.
Two adjacent streets were still closed on January 1, 2004.
One kept the bus terminal out of use through April, while another restricted access to the garages and the covered entrance drive until late November.
The expansion had been due near the end of March 2004, and the collapse pushed the Quarter's opening to late November.
Rebuilding and the delay also raised the cost.
Aztar had started with a $225 million budget, and by the end of 2004 the finished expansion came to about $280 million.
The Quarter opens as Old Havana
In June 2004, with the street still unfinished, Tropicana unveiled a three-story Old Havana mural by a local artist, about 28 feet by 23.
Among its painted storefronts was a cigar shop called "Ana Ciport," Tropicana backward.
The clock tower was painted too, but its clock was real and working.
At noon on November 23, 2004, a short ceremony marked a partial opening. The Havana Tower's 502 rooms were ready, along with most of the shops.
Only the first five garage levels were open, while restaurant and entertainment tenants were still finishing staff training.
Some tenants didn't open until early 2005.
What opened was a shopping street first. By the end of 2004, the Quarter had 26 shops against nine restaurants and five entertainment venues.
The street ran under a painted sky, between faux-aged facades with balconies, past palm trees and fountains, with Cuban and Latin music playing.
Its central gathering spot, Fiesta Plaza, sat by Carmine's and Cuba Libre.
By 2007 the mix had settled.
Brooks Brothers, Chico's, and Swarovski shared the street with The Palm, Red Square, and the Providence nightclub, and an IMAX theater and Comedy Stop sat among them.
Slot machines at the fountain
The fountain in Fiesta Plaza sat on the city side of Pacific Avenue, and no gaming had ever been approved on that side of the avenue.
The Quarter stayed that way for seven years, including a bad stretch for the resort it belonged to.
In December 2007, the New Jersey Casino Control Commission refused to renew Tropicana's casino license after a year of management failures under new owners, among them months without the required independent audit committee and too few staff.
A trustee ran the resort until it could be sold, and the Quarter stayed open the whole time. Tropicana Entertainment took over in March 2010.
The new owner moved the line.
In 2011 the state's Division of Gaming Enforcement approved a gaming test in Fiesta Plaza, with the rollout timed for November and the resort's 30th anniversary.
By late November, two electronic blackjack machines stood at the fountain, and eight penny slots were being added along the wall and staircase.
Three years later, the move ran the other direction.
Atlantic City lost several casinos in 2014, and Tropicana spent that year and the next renovating.
The North Tower casino picked up the Quarter's Cuban look, and its layout was reworked so people coming out of the mall moved more naturally onto the gaming floor.
The work was finished in May 2015.
Bowling lanes where the nightclub was
In July 2023, the space that had held the Providence nightclub reopened as The Royce Social Hall, with two bowling lanes, shuffleboard, and ping pong alongside its bars, plus live music.
Comedy followed in 2024. The Royce came at the end of a run of replacements.
In 2022 the Irish pub Ri Ra became Wild Honey Smokehouse & Tavern, which opened on May 10.
The Old Farmer's Almanac General Store, one of the Quarter's shops, became Gin Rickey's, a cocktail bar with live music.
All three replacements serve food or drinks.
P.F. Chang's, open since 2004, stayed and rebuilt.
It closed for about three months in 2022, put new murals and a 13-foot artificial cherry tree into its two-floor room, and reopened on May 29 as the chain's first East Coast flagship.
It came back with 186 seats.
Several of the early shops are gone: Brooks Brothers, Chico's, Caché, and Tahari. White House Black Market is still there.
The Quarter at Tropicana in 2026
The Old Havana streetscape is still recognizable.
The Quarter at Tropicana is the indoor dining, retail, and entertainment district of Tropicana Atlantic City, at 2801 Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
It opened on November 23, 2004, as Aztar's three-story Old Havana district.
Today Caesars Entertainment runs the resort, and Gaming and Leisure Properties owns the real estate.
Atlantic City's November 2024 holiday kickoff doubled as the Quarter's 20th-anniversary celebration.
The city presented a proclamation, and a 35-foot tree became the centerpiece of a synchronized light show.
Two of the restaurants that opened in 2004, P.F. Chang's and Cuba Libre, are still serving 22 years later, and Carmine's and The Palm are still there too.
The IMAX has screenings scheduled into October 2026, and Caesars still markets the Quarter as Tropicana's main shopping area.
Cuba Libre, which opened in Atlantic City in 2004, still runs late-night dancing at the corner of Iowa and Pacific.
Gin Rickey's and The Royce keep late hours too, and the Atlantic City Comedy Club ran shows at both in 2025 and at The Royce in 2026.
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