From weed hotels to weed museums, Atlantic City plans to become Amsterdam of East Coast

If the powers that be in Atlantic City have their way, the city will look a whole lot greener by the end of the year — in every way but literally.

Since the New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission began approving recreational marijuana dispensaries last April, some towns in New Jersey have been giving weed stores the side-eye or throwing up legal roadblocks.

Not Atlantic City. Under Mayor Marty Small, the Jersey Shore's historical entertainment hotbed has jumped into cannabis with both feet and a snorkel. Per capita, the cannabis businesses that have already received site approval in Atlantic City would make perhaps the densest cannabis city in the state, with more businesses still in the pipeline.

Atlantic City officials say they hope to turn the cash-poor, casino-rich town into the weed capital of New Jersey and beyond.

“My focus is to make Atlantic City great, to make Atlantic City the East Coast hub for cannabis,” said Kashawn “Kash” McKinley, the city's cannabis czar, who hopes to help grow Atlantic City’s fortunes (and tax base) in the fertile soil of a new state industry.

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Atlantic City joins Jersey City as the most ambitious Green Rush towns in the state, said Daniel Ulloa, who’s been tracking the legal environment for cannabis for three years as editor for weed industry blog HeadyNJ.

“I think they understand it as an economic engine,” Ulloa said, “a new industry to help a city that has seen better days.”

In September, the city approved an ambitious plan called the Green Zone, a cannabis-friendly area encompassing many of the city’s central business districts that aren't the boardwalk — primarily spanning the hollowed-out strips along Atlantic and Pacific Avenues that were once prime Monopoly-board real estate.

Atlantic City has nonetheless had a slow start in cannabis. The opening date for the city's first recreational dispensary is, perhaps fittingly, the unofficial marijuana holiday of April 20. Mayor Small held a ceremonial signing of the recreational license for the city's MPX NJ dispensary at on the morning of April 19.

Atlantic City has greenlit at least a dozen more cannabis projects, in the hopes of attracting a new wave of weed tourists who might also want to hit the slots or a music festival, or maybe schedule a dentistry convention.

“Who wouldn't love to consume some great quality cannabis, and then go see a dope show, or go to a convention?” McKinley reasons.

These will include indoor grow farms, a weed hotel, a woman-owned weed mecca in a former church, a wealth of Amsterdam-style cannabis lounges for indoor consumption and even a cannabis museum.

Here are the biggest new projects in the would-be cannabis capital of the Jersey Shore.

First up to the plate: MPX NJ

153 S. New York Ave., 609-616-7770, mpxnj.com.

Atlantic City’s McKinley had made it a strong priority to open the city’s first recreational dispensary by the cannabis holiday of April 20. And with a ceremonial signing on April 19, Mayor Small wrote this into reality.

MPX NJ, a medical dispensary on New York Avenue, set its opening time for recreational customers (read: any adult above the age of 21) at 11 a.m. on April 20. This was the same date set for an unrelated 4/20 cannabis party in the parking lot across the street.

MPX's opening menu for recreational customers includes vapes, tinctures, flower, pre-rolled joints and edibles, with opening-day discounts for the first batch of customers.

"We 've been producing like crazy," said Erin McCarthy of a iAnthus Capital, which owns MPX and operates cannabis businesses in 11 states, including a cannabis grow site in Pleasantville. "We've been waiting for the chance to sell all the inventory that we have."

The location is merely temporary, however. MPX plans to move into a 4,000-square-foot palace of cannabis, on the bottom floor of a mixed-use building under construction a block away at 121-124 St. James Place. Construction is due to be complete around fall 2023, McCarthy said.

The Cannabis Hotel: High Rollers Dispensary and Cannabis Lounge

1800-1804 Pacific Ave.

Jon Cohn’s plans for Atlantic City go back a decade or more.

“I walked through Atlantic City probably 10 years ago,” said Cohn, who also runs cannabis businesses in Pennsylvania. “It just seemed to me, it would be an excellent place to kind of have a Little Amsterdam.”

Now he’s helping build it, shepherding two of the most ambitious cannabis projects in the state.

The most visible will be High Rollers, a 10,000-square-foot, two-floor cannabis dispensary and consumption lounge inside the 1920s-era Claridge Hotel — a onetime casino just a block from the boardwalk.

Cohn’s company Agronomed is an investor and consultant for the dispensary, whose primary owners are Andrew and Denise Kirkland.

The proposed rules for consumption lounges are fairly strict: no alcohol or food served onsite. The High Rollers lounge, attached to a dispensary of the same name, plans to take food delivery from restaurants located in the hotel, Cohn said.

“There are other restaurants at the Claridge,” Cohn said. “Just like we could order food delivery to a hotel room, we could have food delivered to the lounge.”

The dispensary will also offer its own room service: delivery of cannabis to guests at the hotel. The dispensary plans to also offer delivery to other addresses in Atlantic City, and even to other towns along the Shore.

“We also have the right of first refusal on an ocean terrace on the third floor of the hotel,” Cohn said. This would require a variance because the terrace isn’t directly accessible from the dispensary. But it’s his hope that High Rollers will soon offer the state’s first cannabis patio with an ocean view.

Originally slated for summer 2023, Cohn said, the dispensary and lounge is now aiming for Labor Day to ensure they have enough product to sell.

Indoor recreation: More Amsterdam-style consumption lounges

As a temporary measure, Atlantic City closed off its boardwalk to recreational cannabis businesses. In part, McKinley said, this was because the city had newly allowed open alcohol consumption on the boardwalk in 2020. The city is holding off on adding a new ingredient to that mix, he said.

“We're still a family town,” he said. “And we still have kids that go up and down our boardwalk.”

And so for now, the city is encouraging the new crop of cannabis dispensaries to come equipped with consumption lounges where customers can have an Amsterdam-style experience, ordering and consuming their cannabis in the same place.

In addition to High Rollers, at least three more weed lounges have received site approval from the Casino District Redevelopment Authority.

Two are planned on Atlantic Avenue near the Tropicana Atlantic City: A company named Legal Distribution LLC plans a consumption lounge at 3112 Atlantic Ave., while Sunnytien LLC plans another one a block away at 3004 Atlantic Ave.

What's likely the most ambitious lounge aside from High Rollers is planned for a former church near the Hard Rock Hotel, on the opposite side of town.

Pure Genesis, a certified minority and woman-owned business enterprise based in Cherry Hill, plans to build an 8,000-square-foot dispensary and consumption lounge called Endo at the former First Presbyterian Church of Atlantic City at 1015 Pacific Ave.

Some art with your tokes: Design 710

112 Park Place, Atlantic City, 609-964-7420, design710.com. 

Christina Casile, whose Jersey cred includes interior design for the stadium used by the Jets and Giants, hopes to be licensed for recreational sales as soon as May for her medical dispensary, Design 710. (The numerals 710, for those keeping track, spell out “OIL,” a common cannabis derivative, when you turn the numbers upside-down.)

As befits a business from a designer responsible for cannabis shops around the region, Design 710’s interior is distinctive: a graphics-heavy sweep of Shore history.

“We wanted to have somewhere special that paid homage to Atlantic City. That was our goal from the beginning,” she said. “We've got a lot of old-time Atlantic City photos. We've got some cool boards that pay homage to the railroad stations.”

The dispensary opened in March for medical customers. Casile plans to add recreational cannabis as soon as the state gives her the thumbs-up.

“We're hoping Memorial Day,” she said. “If not, you know, middle of June.”

The weed-farm museum: Agri-Kind

1705-1717 Atlantic Ave., agri-kind.com.

The other massive cannabis project spearheaded by Jon Cohn of High Rollers ranks among the largest cannabis development deals in the state. When construction is complete, Agri-Kind will be an expansive 125,000-square-foot indoor marijuana grow site and warehouse, comprising multiple acres and city blocks overall.

But the weed farm will also have a public-facing component: Agri-Kind plans to cement Atlantic City's reputation as the East Coast marijuana capital by establishing a museum devoted to cannabis.

“It'll be much like the Johnny Cash museum or the Elvis museum, but cannabis-based,” Cohn said. “We'll have some memorabilia. ... We'll do events and pop-ups.”

Temporary exhibits might include anything from a focus on specific cannabis breeders to an exhibit devoted to the Grateful Dead or Cheech and Chong, he said.

Cohn's goal, he said, is to do for cannabis what Chocolate World does for Hershey: offer a Willie Wonka look behind the curtain into how the treats get made.

“People don't know how extraction works, or even what it is,” he said, referring to the process of pulling out specific chemicals, such as THC, from a cannabis plant.

He envisions educational displays, exhibits of cannabis-processing machinery, and tours that allow visitors to walk through a mezzanine level to see the marijuana cultivation site, and how the plant is grown and processed.

Maybe they’ll have a little interactive exhibit, Cohn wonders aloud, where you can experience the aromas of various cannabis chemicals called terpenes that determine a cannabis strain’s “flavor."

“I can’t promise we’ll have a roller coaster down to a chocolate river,” Cohn said. “But there will be videos on how (cannabis) oil is made. … It’ll be really educational.”

Matthew Korfhage is a Philadelphia-based reporter for USA Today Network. Email him at mkorfhage@gannett.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewkorfhage.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY NETWORK: Cannabis hotel, museum, lounges: Biggest Atlantic City weed projects