Atlantic City
ATLANTIC CITY
ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey, founded in 1854 on the Jersey Shore, soon became the nation's premier beach resort. The city's elegant hotels and simple rooming houses serviced luxury travelers as well as middle-class vacationers and day-trippers from nearby cities. Diverse tourists crowded the four-mile-long boardwalk and ocean piers, which offered such attractions as dance bands, a diving horse, and, beginning in 1921, the Miss America Pageant. Increasingly, however, wealthy travelers favored beach houses in the Hamptons or farther afield, and low-income tourists preferred newer motels and flashier board-walks elsewhere along the Jersey Shore.
Because of the decline in tourism, the city suffered economically in the mid-twentieth century. This trend reversed after 1976, when New Jersey voters approved a referendum to allow casino gambling in Atlantic City to restore the city's prosperity and yield revenue for educational and social programs. The first casino opened in 1978. Soon afterward, Atlantic City became the eastern seaboard's gambling mecca and witnessed sharp economic growth. The city remained divided, however, between the glitz of the beachfront casinos and the poverty and high unemployment elsewhere in the city. Moreover, its future as a gambling center became uncertain as other states legalized casino and riverboat gambling or permitted Native Americans to operate casinos. Still, New Jersey committed to redeveloping Atlantic City by funding airport renovations, a new convention center, and other projects.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Funnell, Charles E. By the Beautiful Sea: The Rise and High Times of That Great American Resort, Atlantic City. New York: Knopf, 1975.
Paulsson, Martin. The Social Anxieties of Progressive Reform: Atlantic City, 1854–1920. American Social Experience Series. New York: New York University Press, 1994.
Sternlieb, George, and James W. Hughes. The Atlantic City Gamble. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.
RobertFishman/s. b.
See alsoGambling ; Miss America Pageant ; Tourism .