ATLANTIC CITY

Atlantic City, located in southeastern New Jersey on the Atlantic Ocean, was founded in 1854 by a local doctor, Jonathan Pitney, and a Philadelphia civil engineer, Richard Osborne, who saw the site as an opportunity to provide health-giving cool sea breezes to city people in the summer. They built the Camden and Atlantic Railroad, the shortest railroad line connecting Philadelphia (sixty miles away) to the wide beaches of the Jersey shore. In 1870, in order to reduce the tramping of sand into stores and hotels, an eight-foot wide wooden walk was built, linking the beach with the town. Ten years later, a much longer boardwalk was constructed along the shore. Eventually, the wooden walkway extended six miles and was sixty feet wide. This innovation attracted genteel crowds who strolled along its smooth and sand-free walkway, delighting in the vistas of ocean and displaying themselves to other usually well-dressed walkers.

The new influx of customers led to the building of luxury hotels such as Surf House and United State Hotel, along with rooming houses and smaller, less commodious hotels for the middle class. Atlantic City became famous for its well-ordered beaches (controlled by a patrol established in 1881) and Sunday restrictions on drinking and popular music. Modern technology came early too, such as an electric trolley in 1893. Genteel standards were assured by the presence of substantial and large summer cottages used by the families of business and professional elites from Philadelphia.

Nevertheless, more plebeian crowds were attracted to the piers that sprang up along the boardwalk. These piers featured new mechanical rides in the 1890s, as well as freak shows and shooting galleries. While the town attempted to preserve a respectable middle-class social tone, pressure from the down-market day trippers with cheap train tickets from Philadelphia and New Jersey towns gradually eroded these standards.

By 1900, Atlantic City was drawing more than 100,000 visitors on peak summer weekends. In the twentieth century, attractions ranged from vaudeville and jazz bands to the Miss America pageant, which has been held in Atlantic City every September since 1921. Productions headed for Broadway often first tried out their shows in Atlantic City in the 1920s and 1930s.

These and other attractions failed to draw patrons after World War II, when the more affluent deserted the ocean-front hotels to rent or purchase beach houses on Long Beach Island, New Jersey; the Hamptons on Long Island, New York; or farther afield. Low-income vacationers also left the rooming houses for newer motels and flashier boardwalks elsewhere along the Jersey shore. The availability of cars freed vacationers from the old haunts of their train-dependent parents, and by the 1970s cheap and fast air travel, especially to the Caribbean and Florida (especially Disney World, established in 1971) further contributed to the decline of Atlantic City. The town had not only failed to invest in improvements, but its dependence on customers during the relatively short summer season made it impossible to compete with new southern resorts.

In 1976, New Jersey voters approved a referendum allowing casino gambling in Atlantic City. Promoters hoped to reverse the town's fortunes by introducing gamblers from the East Coast to legal and local games. By 1995, the city's casino industry employed 30,000 people directly and 40,000 in related industries; in 1993, 30 million visitors to the city wagered more than $3 billion in the city's thirteen major hotel-casinos. Once the nation's premier beach resort, Atlantic City (population 40,517 in 2000) became the East Coast's gambling mecca, with a daily pilgrimage made by many people of relatively modest means, often retirees traveling by bus, to its casinos.

The 1976 gambling referendum was intended to restore the city to prosperity and to yield revenue for the state's programs for education, senior citizens, and the disabled. Gambling revenues certainly aided these groups, but Atlantic City remained divided in the 1990s between the glitz of the beachfront casinos and the poverty of the rest of 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 on their own territory.

Casino gambling brought prosperity back to the boardwalk, but hopes that gambling would restore prosperity to the entire city had not been met by the early 2000s. Most visitors to the city continued to be daytrippers, who went directly to the casinos and avoided the rest of the city. Additionally, casino jobs were held predominantly by commuters from outside the city. Decaying tenement buildings and empty lots still stood in the shadow of the casinos in the early twenty-first century, despite attempts by developers to diversify the city's economy with a convention center and shopping malls. Atlantic City has not suffered the fate of its New York counterpart, Coney Island, with the demolition of almost all of its early twentieth century attractions. However, as a representative of an earlier commercial leisure site built around a mix of genteel hotels, boardwalks, and shows on the one hand, and plebeian pleasures of amusement parks and sideshows on the other, it has only partially been able to shift to a new mode of commercialized leisure, modern casino gambling.

See also: Beaches, Gambling, Las Vegas, Senior Leisure Lifestyles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Funnell, Charles. By the Beautiful Sea: The Rise and High Times of That Great American Resort, Atlantic City. New York: Random House, 1975.

Levi, Vicki Gold, and Lee Eisenberg. Atlantic City: 125 Years of Ocean Madness. New York, 1979.

Paulsson, Martin. The Social Anxieties of Progressive Reform: Atlantic City, 1854–1920. New York, 1994.

Riverol, Armando. Live from Atlantic City: The History of the Miss America Pageant Before, After, and in Spite of Television. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992.

Sternlieb, George, and James W. Hughes. The Atlantic City Gamble. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Gary Cross