“Someone has taped a handwritten sign to the jitney stop that reads "Driver Bobby is the best" with three exclamation points and a drawing of a bus.”

The NJ Transit train from Penn Station dumps you at the Atlantic City terminal around dusk if you time it right, and the walk from there to the Boardwalk takes about twelve minutes through streets that feel like they belong to a different city than the one on the postcards. You pass a Dominican bakery with its door propped open, a check-cashing place, a mural of somebody's grandmother. Then the air shifts — you smell salt and funnel cake grease simultaneously — and there it is, the Boardwalk, wider than you remember, the planks giving slightly under your shoes. The Tropicana sits at the southern end, near where the boards start to thin out, past the Steel Pier and the taffy shops. It's not the flashiest tower on the skyline. It's the one with the parking garage that looks like it's been there since the Carter administration and doesn't care.

You enter through a side door off the Boardwalk because the main entrance faces the street and that feels wrong, like arriving at a beach town through the back of a strip mall. Inside, the casino floor hits you immediately — no lobby buffer, just carpet and noise and the particular light of a room with no windows. You keep walking. The Havana Tower elevators are past the food court, past a shop selling airbrushed t-shirts, past a Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville that smells exactly like you think it does.

The suite, the sounds, the situation

The Havana Tower One-Bedroom Suite is the kind of room that tries hard and mostly succeeds. It's big — genuinely big, not hotel-big — with a separate living area that has a pullout couch, a dining table for four, and enough floor space that you could do yoga without hitting furniture. The bedroom is through a set of double doors, and the king bed faces a wall of windows looking out over the city, not the ocean. This matters. You get rooftops and parking lots and, in the distance, the marshy flats of the mainland. It's not a view you'd put on Instagram, but at night, when the casino signs bleed neon across the low skyline, it has a strange, melancholy beauty.

The bathroom is modern in the way that means white tile and chrome fixtures and a shower with decent pressure but a glass door that doesn't quite seal at the bottom — you'll want to keep a towel on the floor. The toiletries are generic. The TV works. The WiFi holds up for streaming but seems to struggle around 1 AM, which is exactly when you want it most because you've come back from the Boardwalk and you're eating leftover White House Sub Shop on the couch. That sub shop, by the way — White House Subs on Arctic Avenue, a ten-minute walk from the hotel — is the real reason to be in this part of town. Get the Italian special. It's been the same sandwich since 1946 and it's enormous.

What the Tropicana gets right is that it doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. This is a casino-resort on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, and it leans into that identity. The Quarter, the hotel's indoor shopping and restaurant complex, is a weird fever dream of faux-Cuban architecture — wrought-iron balconies, painted facades, palm trees growing under a ceiling painted to look like a perpetual sunset. It should be tacky. It is tacky. But at 10 PM on a Saturday, with a live band playing salsa outside a restaurant called Cuba Libre, it works. You order a mojito and sit on a bench and watch a couple in matching tracksuits slow-dance near the fountain.

“Atlantic City is a place that keeps almost dying and never quite does, and there's something honest about that.”

The suite's separate living room earns its keep in the morning. You make coffee with the in-room Keurig — the pods are Tropicana-branded, which feels like a commitment — and sit at the dining table watching the light come in flat and gray over the city. The air conditioning unit clicks on and off with the regularity of a metronome. From up here, you can see the Boardwalk joggers, a few of them, and the seagulls doing their morning patrol. The carpet in the hallway outside your door has a pattern that suggests someone in 2007 thought it looked tropical. The ice machine on the floor is three doors down and works.

One honest thing: the walk from the Havana Tower rooms to the Boardwalk exit takes a solid seven minutes through the casino floor. If you're carrying beach gear or have kids, factor that in. There's no shortcut. You will pass the slots. You will hear the slots. At 8 AM, there are already people at the slots, and they look like they've been there since Tuesday. I say this without judgment — I once sat at a blackjack table for four hours because the dealer was telling me about his daughter's soccer tournament and I couldn't leave mid-story.

Walking out

You check out on a Sunday morning and the Boardwalk is different than it was Friday night. Quieter. A man is fishing off the rail near the Pier. The taffy shops aren't open yet. The ocean is doing its thing regardless — gray-green and indifferent, the way the Atlantic always is in New Jersey. You walk north toward the Absecon Lighthouse, the tallest in the state, because it's there and it's free to look at from the outside and the neighborhood around it is the kind of residential quiet that reminds you Atlantic City is a place where people actually live, not just visit. The jitney — the little buses that run up and down Pacific Avenue for 3 USD — passes you heading south. Driver Bobby, presumably, at the wheel.

Havana Tower suites at the Tropicana start around 179 USD on weeknights and climb past 300 USD on summer weekends — what that buys you is space, a Boardwalk address, and the particular pleasure of a casino-resort that doesn't take itself too seriously.