Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America

Rating:
Summary: Review from the New Orleans Times-Picayune
Review: No one can deny that casinos have brought money and crowds back to
Atlantic City. Since the first casino opened in 1978, gambling
corporations have invested six billion dollars in the old resort town
and, during the 1990s, more tourists visited Atlantic City than any
other place in the United States including Las Vegas and Disneyworld.
Each year, the city entertains twice the population of metropolitan New
York and those visitors "wager almost enough money to fund the nation's
space program." During the past quarter century, the casinos have
generated eighty percent of the city's total property taxes, five and a
half billion tax dollars for the state, and created over 42,000 new
jobs.

Despite these impressive numbers, in "Boardwalk of Dreams" Bryant Simon
concludes that "the gaming industry has not saved Atlantic City."
Instead, he finds that bringing casinos to the New Jersey shore was a
"devil's bargain." Twenty-six years of gaming, he argues, have left the
city in many ways worse off than it was in the mid-1970s when it was a
decaying, honky tonk resort whose best days had long passed. Today,
Simon maintains, Atlantic City is a dysfunctional place with a jarring
landscape of fortress-like casinos surrounded by boarded storefronts and
derelict houses. Only a few blocks from Donald Trump's "gaudy and
gilded showplace" the Taj Mahal, "are some of the loneliest, most
desolate streets in America."

For Simon, an urban historian at Temple University in Philadelphia, the
story of Atlantic City is a colorful but heartbreaking tale. Long known
as the "Queen of American Resorts,"Atlantic City grew famous in the
first half of the twentieth century as the premier vacation destination
for the middle class. Using a formula later perfected by Las Vegas, the
city's hotels offered exotic architecture and elaborate amenities at a
moderate cost. Salesmen and bookkeepers luxuriated with their families
in lobbies filled with overstuffed chairs, chandeliers, and Chippendale
furniture, but then retreated to rooms that they could afford. At night,
Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Dean Martin, Louie Prima, and Louis
Armstrong provided stylish entertainment to crowds with moderate
incomes. Vacationers donned their flashiest outfits, paraded down the
boardwalk, and proved to the world that they had made it. As an escapist
retreat for the middle class, Simon writes, Atlantic City "was
Disneyland a generation before there was a Disneyland."

Away from the beach, along the streets with names that the board game
Monopoly made famous, the city's working class residents also thrived.
Although Atlantic City was built as tourist destination, generations of
Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants from Europe, and African-
Americans from the South, had come to find jobs. They created
tightly-knit neighborhoods filled with corner groceries, ethnic
restaurants, neighborhood taverns, and long rows of houses with porches
where families sat on summer evenings. It was a place where people
walked to work, to worship, to visit friends, and to shop. Like many
urban historians who lament the passing of the old "walking cities,"
Simon lauds the rich cultural and social life of these now vanished
neighborhoods.

In the Italian neighborhood known as Ducktown, Simon writes, "locals
could find three bakeries selling warm, crusty loaves Of Italian Bread."
"Next door were fruit stands and fish markets. Nearby grocery stores
sold milk and eggs, roasted peppers and imported Parmesan cheese.
Around the corner, sandwich makers built long Italian hoagies made out
of lettuce, tomatoes, onions, provolone, Genoa salami,...and hot red
peppers. Neighborhood tailors and barbers played scratchy opera records
and decorated their walls with pictures of the pope and Frank Sinatra.
Ducktown restaurants served big bowls of gnocchi with garlicky marinara
sauce and stubby glasses of homemade wine. Above the eateries and
stores were social clubs likes the Knights of Columbus and the Al-Ki
Club where men who spoke only Italian played nickel and dime games of
hearts."

But even during its golden era when this social fabric was intact, the
city was not without flaws. In order to make the boardwalk a fantasy
world for middle-class whites, Atlantic City was a Jim Crow town.
Police harassed African-Americans who tried to swim at the white beach.
Restaurants refused to serve black tourists or demanded exorbitant
prices from them. When black families tried to check into the famous
hotels, desk managers claimed their reservations had been lost. By
making black tourists feel unwelcome, businessmen and police made sure
the only African-Americans on the "boardwalk of dreams" were bellhops,
entertainers, cooks, and the men who pushed the wicker rickshaws in
which white tourists rode. Even the businesses along Atlantic Avenue
where year-round residents shopped were for whites only.
African-Americans patronized the stores on Arctic Avenue in the black
section of town.

It was no coincidence, Simon contends, that the decline in white middle
class tourism coincided with civil rights activists' successful efforts
to end Atlantic City's de facto segregation during the late 1950s and
1960s. Worried that Atlantic City was "now unmanageable and out of
control, the accountants and clerks who had in the past spent their
summers in town...went into hiding in segregated suburbs, malls, movie
theaters, amusement parks, and outdoor worlds." Many white year-round
residents left town as well.

"White flight" exacerbated other challenges the city faced. With the
advent of air conditioning, television, and backyard swimming pools,
fewer families flocked to the ocean each summer. Cheap airfares allowed
the middle class access to new, distant destinations. "As the white
tourists stayed away," Simon writes, "fancy Boardwalk jewelry stores
turned into hot dog stands." The boardwalk grew increasingly seedy and
soon the black middle class stayed away as well. Crowds still gathered
for the Miss America Pageant each September, and the Shriners still came
for conventions and salt-water taffy, but by the 1970s Atlantic City had
become synonymous with urban decay. It was hardly a place to go to
escape the cares of the world. "Without respectable, well-dressed
crowds," Simon maintains, "Atlantic City lost its ability to host
nightly reenactments of the American Dream of upward mobility, and when
that happened, the cycle of decline was on a vicious, unrelenting
course."

As the situation grew more desperate in the 1970s, city leaders
increasingly viewed casino gambling as a panacea. They had watched
enviously for decades as gaming transformed Las Vegas into a boomtown
and they were certain they could mimic that success. Vegas, after all,
was in the middle of the Nevada desert. Atlantic City was an ocean
front resort situated amidst millions of potential gamblers in New York,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.

In 1976, New Jersey voters approved casino gambling in Atlantic City.
Confident that jobs and glittering prosperity were on the way, joyful
residents in the city's working class neighborhoods literally danced in
the streets. "Everyone," one local leader recalled, "was a millionaire
that night." Curtis Kugel, the owner of a venerable Atlantic City
seafood restaurant, spoke for many when he predicted that his town would
"turn around and be what it was in the twenties and thirties." The
"boardwalk of dreams" would be reborn.

When the first casino opened two years later, such hopes quickly faded.
Most of the jobs created by the casinos went to non-residents. Because
casino managers did not want employees competing with gamblers for
parking spaces, they built "intercept lots" outside of town and bused
employees from their cars to their jobs. As result, few workers "ever
stepped foot on Atlantic City streets" and "there was little chance for
any of the casino riches to trickle down into the city."

Restaurateurs and amusement pier operators who hoped to feed and
entertain giant crowds also found disappointment. It soon became
apparent that the new tourists seldom left the casinos. Gamblers lined
up at casino buffets instead. And casino architects fashioned their
buildings in a manner that made access to the boardwalk and beach
difficult. Casino patrons remained sealed in a windowless, clockless
maze of slot machines until their money ran out and tour operators
herded them back onto buses.

Atlantic City's ethnic neighborhoods also suffered. Speculators and
casino corporations bought houses in those districts, tore them down,
and built parking lots. During the early 1980s, bulldozers leveled one
third of the city's homes. Local efforts to resist such change proved
futile and residents who refused to sell found that their quality of
life quickly deteriorated. All of the city's movie theaters met the
wrecking ball. Buses rumbled down the streets at all hours. Crime rose
by eighty percent. Pawn shops replaced corner groceries. The last
vestiges of the "walking city" disappeared. Today, Simon laments, "the
old corner stores, friendly taverns, jazz clubs, Jewish delis, fresh
fruit stands, and butcher shops...are all gone." In their place, is a
"flat, desolate lunar landscape of streets increasingly empty except for
the luckless and dispossessed."

On the boardwalk, the old hotels and restaurants began to shut their
doors. Luigi's, Carl Kruger's restaurant that had once served a
thousand dinners a night to hungry vacationers, closed and made way for
a casino. The massive Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel, a faded masterpiece
of orientalist architecture, was torn down and replaced by a Bally's
casino "that looked like an unimaginative merging of a Day's Inn and a
K-Mart." Even Reese Palley, one of Atlantic City's most ardent gambling
proponents, eventually lamented the changes casinos had wrought. "We
were all innocents," he said later. "We didn't know what would happen...We
didn't have to sacrifice everything."

Although "Boardwalk of Dreams" paints a depressing portrait of present
day Atlantic City, Simon's love for the city and its history is clear.
Even in its halcyon days, he reminds us, the city had its share of
problems. But it was also a vibrant place and Simon masterfully
recreates this lost world full of music, whimsy, culture, and style.
Ultimately, however, his book is a powerful and cautionary tale about
the perils of an over reliance on tourism and of using "quick fixes,
like gambling, to solve deep and vexing economic and social problems."
Casinos, Simon concludes, have not made Atlantic City a better
community. The glory days have not returned. Instead, the "Queen of
resorts" is now "a stark, vacant, poor city with a beach, the Boardwalk,
and,...twelve separate, inward looking casinos...that leave only crumbs on
the Monopoly streets around them."