Rivers Casino is opening a 62-room boutique hotel next to Penn Treaty Park in Fishtown

Rivers Casino announced that it will manage a 62-room hotel, called Riversuites, in the The Battery, a mixed-use complex opened in the former Delaware River Generating Station next to Penn Treaty Park. It is the latest development in a boutique hotel boom in Fishtown that has been accelerating since the pandemic.

Lubert-Adler Real Estate Funds renovated the century-old structure, which once generated electricity for half of the city, and transformed it into 173 apartments, offices, and commercial spaces. The space where the casino-managed hotel will be built was once earmarked for more apartments.

Opening a hotel has “always been something that we wanted to do, even going back to pre-opening,” said Eric Althaus, general manager of the Rivers Casino Philadelphia. “This gives us another tool to take care of our guests and to bring people to this area that typically don’t come up [to Philadelphia].”

There will be no hotel bar, but the Riversuites will feature a basketball court, a billiards table, and “a large gathering space on the third floor that will eventually have a breakfast component,” according to Althaus.

The hotel will have one-, two-, and three-bedroom suites, including bi-level units that will be up to 2,266 square feet. Each unit will have a full kitchen.

“It’s long overdue for the casino [to have a hotel component],” said Marc Collazzo, executive director of the Fishtown business improvement district. “This allows them to cater to high rollers to come in and stay and get a real good experience not just with the casino, but with the entire neighborhood.”

The Riversuites are the latest luxury hotel to be announced in Fishtown.

The Wells Fargo building at Frankford and Girard Avenues, a short walk from the casino, is being made into a 60-room operation run by Sonder, the international chain. That company has another 20-room building at 1502 Frankford Avenue, and a handful of smaller operators are sprinkled along Front Street. Local developer Roland Kassis hosts 11 rooms at his hotel, Archway, which is located across the street from popular restaurant Suraya, and he has long eyed a large vacant lot north of Frankford Hall for a larger hotel offering.

As Fishtown and the neighborhoods around it have become increasingly popular dining and nightlife destinations, the demand for short-term rentals has soared.

But the casino, on the other side of eight lanes of Delaware Avenue, is isolated from the rest of the neighborhood, making it less likely to attract visitors who come to Fishtown for entertainment. Opening an adjacent hotel gives the operation an opportunity to appeal to customers beyond local gamblers.

As the casino industry has spread across the country, operations like Rivers have tended to appeal more to locals than tourists, according to a 2010 research paper from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve.

In the 1990s, when gambling was largely banned, the handful of legal resorts like Las Vegas or Atlantic City pulled in over 80% of their clientele from out-of-state. Since then, the numbers have flipped, and over 80% of gamblers who visit the multiplicity of local casinos from Michigan to Maryland come from in-state.

Althaus says Rivers can break that mold, especially given the casino’s location on a state border. He declined to provide exact numbers on the regional composition of their clientele.

“We currently advertise out of the area and out of the state and we actually have a billboard, down near Atlantic City,” said Althaus. “As we look to an opening date sometime later this year, we’ll have a deeper strategy that involves marketing to areas outside Philadelphia.”

The project will cost $7 million to complete, adding 40 new jobs, and should be completed by the end of this year.