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

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During the first half of the twentieth century, Atlantic City was the nation s most popular middle-class resort--the home of the famed Boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant, and the board game Monopoly. By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journalists to bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America s most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, and the highway has replaced the Boardwalk as the city s most important thoroughfare. Today the city doesn t have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress protected by metal detectors and security guards.
In this wide-ranging book, Bryant Simon does far more than tell a nostalgic tale of Atlantic City s rise, near death, and reincarnation. He turns the depiction of middle-class vacationers into a revealing discussion of the boundaries of public space in urban America. In the past, he argues, the public was never really about democracy, but about exclusion. During Atlantic City s heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. The overly boisterous or improperly dressed were kept out of theaters and hotel lobbies by uniformed ushers and police. The creation of Atlantic City as the "Nation s Playground" was dependent on keeping undesirables out of view unless they were pushing tourists down the Boardwalk on rickshaw-like rolling chairs or shimmying in smoky nightclubs.
Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city s public spaces more open and democratic, too open and democratic for many middle-class Americans, who fled to suburbs and suburban-style resorts like Disneyworld. With the opening of the first casino in 1978, the urban balance once again shifted, creating twelve separate, heavily guarded, glittering casinos worlds walled off from the dilapidated houses, boarded-up businesses, and lots razed for redevelopment that never came. Tourists are deliberately kept away from the city s grim reality and its predominantly poor African American residents. Despite ten of thousands of buses and cars rolling into every day, gambling has not saved Atlantic City or returned it to its glory days.
Simon s moving narrative of Atlantic City s past points to the troubling fate of urban America and the nation s cultural trajectory in the twentieth century, with broad implications for those interested in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, and history.
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During the first half of the twentieth century, Atlantic City was the nation s most popular middle-class resort--the home of the famed Boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant, and the board game Monopoly. By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journalists to bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America s most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, and the highway has replaced the Boardwalk as the city s most important thoroughfare. Today the city doesn t have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress protected by metal detectors and security guards.

In this wide-ranging book, Bryant Simon does far more than tell a nostalgic tale of Atlantic City s rise, near death, and reincarnation. He turns the depiction of middle-class vacationers into a revealing discussion of the boundaries of public space in urban America. In the past, he argues, the public was never really about democracy, but about exclusion. During Atlantic City s heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. The overly boisterous or improperly dressed were kept out of theaters and hotel lobbies by uniformed ushers and police. The creation of Atlantic City as the "Nation s Playground" was dependent on keeping undesirables out of view unless they were pushing tourists down the Boardwalk on rickshaw-like rolling chairs or shimmying in smoky nightclubs.

Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city s public spaces more open and democratic, too open and democratic for many middle-class Americans, who fled to suburbs and suburban-style resorts like Disneyworld. With the opening of the first casino in 1978, the urban balance once again shifted, creating twelve separate, heavily guarded, glittering casino worlds walled off from the dilapidated houses, boarded-up businesses, and lots razed for redevelopment that never came. Tourists are deliberately kept away from the city s grim reality and its predominantly poor African American residents. Despite ten of thousands of buses and cars rolling in every day, gambling has not saved Atlantic City or returned it to its glory days.

Simon s moving narrative of Atlantic City s past points to the troubling fate of urban America and the nation s cultural trajectory in the twentieth century, with broad implications for those interested in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, and history.

Author Bryant Simon

Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Bryant Simon, Author of Boardwalk of Dreams

Q: You’ve described yourself as a native of South New Jersey. What drew you to writing the history of Atlantic City?

A: When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in Vineland, Philly was not the place that drew us; it was more Atlantic City. That was where we went for splurge meals, special occasions, amusement parks, parades, and shopping. In fact, that’s where I got my bar mitzvah suit! Years later, my family moved just outside of Atlantic City and I watched, while riding my bike in the morning on the Boardwalk, as gambling woke the place up and irrevocably transformed it. I was transfixed by the city, by people’s nostalgia for it, by its nervous energy, and its aching sadness and painful poverty in the midst of plenty. Really, it had everything I wanted to write about it--it was like a Springsteen song, a place that could be mean and cruel, but a place of romance and possible redemption. How could I resist?

Q: Compared to places like Las Vegas or Coney Island in its heyday, how did/does Atlantic City epitomize the urban playground?

A: All of these places share something in common--they are each the tale of two cities. They are places built in the interests of visitors, not necessarily residents; they sell (or sold) fantasies--fantasies that put tourists as the center of the narrative and allowed them to slip their daily skin and imagine themselves not as they were, but as they wanted to be. That is what people paid for when they went to these places--they paid for fantasies.

Q: As you researched the book, what memorable anecdotes did you come across that really captured the heart and history of Atlantic City?

A: One of the first things I learned about Atlantic City stayed with me throughout the project. I remember looking at a postcard from the 1920s or so. In it, the benches on the Boardwalk were pointed away from the beach. I asked if this was a mistake. “No,” an expert on the city told me, “That’s how it was.” That was my first lesson that Atlantic City was essentially a stage and the visitors were both actors and audience.

Q: You’ve been interviewed for a documentary that’s set to run in conjunction with the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. What do you make of the series’ take on Atlantic City, and what to your mind does it say about public perception of the city?

A: If the show is a success, it will no doubt draw tourists to town, looking for the romantic, if still violent, past that the program surely mythologizes. Yet the real Atlantic City Boardwalk of today has little relationship to the past except its common geography. Most of the dreamlike hotels--buildings that looked like French chateaux and Moorish palaces--have been torn down. The amusement piers are long gone or covered up and turned into air-conditioned malls. Except for the ocean and Boardwalk, most of Atlantic City’s past has been sacrificed to make way for casinos. People will still find plenty of “booze, broads, and gambling,” but these things on the ground may not carry the same romance as they do on film.

Q: This isn’t a topic that has gotten much coverage elsewhere, but could you elaborate on the role race played in the politics of Atlantic City?

A: Boardwalk Empire suggests that Atlantic City in the era of Prohibition was a “wide open town” and all about “booze, broads, and gambling,” but that was only part of the truth. In fact, many first-generation immigrant families came expressly to show off; to announce that they had made it, which they could do by parading along the Boardwalk stage in their dressiest clothes. Crucial to this staging was segregation. Atlantic City was not just a city of mobsters, speakeasies, and brothels. It was, in the words of a longtime resident born in Georgia, a “Jim Crow for sure.” Its schools, clubs, neighborhoods, and movie houses were segregated. In fact, segregation was more important to Atlantic City than prohibition or mobsters. Visitors--those legions of recent immigrants and their children--would not have embraced an integrated tourist city. To them, making it in America meant being white and living apart (and drinking apart) from people of color. That’s how the rich did it, and that’s how the people who emulated them wanted to do it.

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