"If the people who came to town had wanted Bible readings, we'd have given 'em that. But nobody asked for Bible readings. They wanted booze, broads and gambling, so that's what we gave 'em."
— Atlanic City Solicitor Murray Fredericks, as quoted in Nelson Johnson's "Boardwalk Empire"
The nation was howling toward the end of a roaring decade, that summer of 1929, and nowhere was America's excess of gayety more indulged or profitably promoted than Atlantic City.
The city fathers claimed a staggering (sometimes literally) 12 million people — one-tenth of the county's population at the time — reveled on their beaches and strolled down their famous Boardwalk that summer, and it was the sole occupation of city residents to make sure those folks went home happy.
Music, theater and entertainments of every sort lined the piers. Gambling and prostitution thrived — not just with the tacit approval of local authorities, but with their enthusiastic participation. Prohibition was such a local joke they didn't even bother with speakeasies: Liquor was for sale everywhere, from the posh hotels to the farmer's market.
Mankind is blessed with but five senses. Atlantic City tickles them all. - New York Times, Aug. 11., 1929
Even the staid, stolid New York Times couldn't help but be swept away when it visited, calling Atlantic City "America's beach about as certainly as Washington is the nation's political capital.""Mankind is blessed with but five senses. Atlantic City tickles them all," the paper gushed in an Aug. 11 article. "The Boardwalk is a magnificent proof of America's newly found wealth and leisure. It is an iridescent bubble on the surface of our fabulous prosperity."
Except, of course, like all bubbles, it was destined to pop. The day after Labor Day in 1929, the Dow Jones industrial average climbed to 381.17. It would not reach that level again until 1954.
'Call it a correction'
During the intervening years, Atlantic City survived the Great Depression, the end of Prohibition, World War II, cheap airline fares, backyard pools, an increasing profusion of summer vacation options available to the middle class and the inexorable tendency of all voguish places to lose their luster.
All of which is instructive to remember this past week, when casino closures strafed the city like so many "Boardwalk Empire"-era mob hits: Showboat shuttered on Sunday; two-year-old Revel, a spectacular $2.4 billion flop, folded on Tuesday; that same day, Trump Plaza announced it would follow suit come Sept. 16.
The packed beaches of Atlantic City as a resort and convention town in the 1940's.Photo: Getty Images
The shutdowns prompted a round of obituaries to be penned about the stuttering city, each of them accompanied by photos of chains being stretched across gaming-floor entrances, grim-faced croupiers on unemployment lines and the empty herringbone-patterned blanks of the famous Boardwalk.
The cause of the crisis is as plain as the rows of empty slot machines. Citywide gambling revenues, which reached a high of $5.2 billion in 2006, have been cut in half. During that time, the number of casinos operating on the East Coast have doubled, with new facilities opening in Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania. And that doesn't count the casinos in Connecticut that were already siphoning AC's mojo.
To anyone whose familiarity with the city only reaches back to when gambling was legalized there in 1977, this perhaps looks like the end of days.
But to the small group of people who know the city's past? This? This is nothing.
"I call it a correction," said Vicki Gold Levi, an author and unofficial city historian. "I'm not minimizing the job loss. That is a tragedy, no question. But from a historical perspective, having lived through some of it and studied other parts, Atlantic City has rebirth in its blood. It has this way of consistently reinventing itself."
City of lucky losers
Understand this about Atlantic City: Like perhaps few other places on Earth, it was a city built on failure.
And not just because all those casinos were erected on the backs of losers. The man who first envisioned the city, Jonathan Pitney, only turned his attention to what was then known as Absecon Island because he lost a run for Congress in 1848.
In a history that is entertainingly documented in "Boardwalk Empire," the Nelson Johnson book that served as a loose inspiration for the HBO crime drama of the same name, Pitney emerges as a fitting founder for a city that would make its future on hustling outsiders.
A candy store owner's shop was flooded during a storm in 1883, soaking his entire cache of taffy in Atlantic Ocean brine. What, he was asked, should they do with the ruined stock? "Call it salt-water taffy and sell it anyway," he replied. The name made it an instant hit.
Pitney was a country doctor with a barely-limping-along medical practice who was looking to sell the healing powers of salt water and sea air to the wealthy as a cure for ailments.
His only problem was getting them there. After being rejected in Trenton, where lawmakers called proposed rail line to the island "Pitney's folly," he attracted sufficient investment to the idea. The city was incorporated in March 1854. The Camden-Atlantic railroad arrived in July.
The passenger cars were seldom empty that summer, or in the ones that followed. The number of hotels and boardinghouses quickly multiplied.
Which wasn't to say the early years were easy. Boats that tried to bring visitors by sea often shipwrecked. Swarms of greenhead flies, gnats and mosquitoes could make the streets unbearable during the doldrums of summer. Storms battered it in winter.
The history of the Boardwalk itself is a study in resilience: four earlier versions of it were either washed away or splintered by tourists before it could be built sturdily enough to withstand the test of time.
Salt-water taffy? Another success born of catastrophe. A candy store owner's shop was flooded during a storm in 1883, soaking his entire cache of taffy in Atlantic Ocean brine. What, he was asked, should they do with the ruined stock? "Call it salt-water taffy and sell it anyway," he replied. The name made it an instant hit.
Even Atlantic City's most successful export, Monopoly, has its roots in failure. Charles Darrow only started selling his version of the game, using the names of Atlantic City streets on the properties, after he lost his job.
The stinging '60s
Yet through it all, Atlantic City built itself into a Mecca of tourism, entertainment and vice.
On Labor Day 1929, railroad officials claimed nearly 1 million people jammed the island. Hotels were so overbooked, the Chamber of Commerce ran ads in the local newspaper begging private citizens to take visitors into their homes.
The political boss who ran the show from behind the scenes, Enoch "Nucky" Johnson, who serves as the inspiration for the character Nucky Thompson on HBO, was pulling in $500,000 a year in bribes and kickbacks. In 2014 dollars, that's $7 million.
There were occasional attempts by reformers to clean up the town and prosecute the rackets. But they inevitably ran up against Atlantic County grand juries that refused to issue indictments.
If you look at the city itself and you look at the numbers, the repeal of Prohibition was the beginning of the long ride down. It was pretty slow at first. The '50s were still a great decade. But people were slipping away. - Enoch 'Nucky' Johnson
The citizenry liked things just the way they were.
Still, the good times couldn't last forever. A buzz-kill that began with the stock-market crash was hastened by the end of Prohibition in 1933. The postwar years may have looked like a second Golden Era — with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis playing the 500 Club, Sammy Davis Jr. and Nat King Cole at Club Harlem, and Frank Sinatra on Steel Pier — but the momentum had clearly shifted.
"If you look at the city itself and you look at the numbers, the repeal of Prohibition was the beginning of the long ride down," said Johnson, the author. "It was pretty slow at first. The '50s were still a great decade. But people were slipping away."
The same forces — suburbanization, highway development, mortgage redlining — that crippled cities across the country hurt Atlantic City equally. The 1964 Democratic National Convention, which was supposed to showcase the city's hospitality, turned into a high-profile embarrassment.
"A lot of the hotels were not up to the task of hosting the convention — or, I should say, they were not up to the task of hosting the media," said Heather Perez, the archivist for the Atlantic City Heritage Collection at the Atlantic City Free Public Library. "They were being put up in these aging hotels where the air conditioning was broken. There wasn't much happening at the convention itself, so the focus became on the perceived downturn of Atlantic City."
Even the city's endemic corruption eventually caught up to it. In 1972, every top official in the city — the mayor and all the commissioners — was indicted. By that point, the slide seemed complete.
"The city had really become dilapidated," Levi said. "We used to say, 'Last person out of Atlantic City, turn off the lights.' "
Doubling down
Into this morass stepped an idealistic, Yale-educated state Assemblyman named Steven Perskie, who became the catalyst for what everyone agreed could be the solution to Atlantic City's woes: legalized gambling.
A 1968 ballot measure trying to win approval had failed miserably.
"What we were trying to propose was to take the most corrupt industry in America, and put in the most corrupt city in America, that was located in the most corrupt state in America," Perskie said. "It's wasn't an easy sell."
The Revel Casino closed on Sept. 2, leaving the slots no longer spinning.Photo: AP
Perskie went up under the pretense of briefing a would-be candidate about taxation. But, really, Perskie had only one question: If elected, would Byrne support gambling in Atlantic City?
Byrne's reply, according to Perskie, was that he had testified at the 1968 hearings about legalized gambling and that he wouldn't change his mind.
"And then he waited about 20 minutes — or probably it was more like 20 seconds — and then he said, 'I was the only law-enforcement official in the state to go down to Trenton and testify in favor of the bill. It has to be done carefully, but I would support it,' " Perskie said. "If people wouldn't have talked about me for all these years, I could have jumped up and kissed him."
The gambling ballot initiative succeeded in 1976, and the first dice were rolled in 1977. What followed was a kind of second heyday for the city. Within the next few years, a city whose entire 1976 tax base had been $297 million saw $6 billion in capital investment.
When Resorts Atlantic City opened on Memorial Day 1978, the line of people on the Boardwalk waiting to get in stretched for blocks. Other casinos soon followed. Off-Boardwalk properties remained seedy. But as the national economy improved in the early '80s, Atlantic City roared in ways it hadn't since the '20s.
Return of spectacle?
What it couldn't see, once again, was the good times coming to an end.
"When Atlantic City had a regional monopoly on gambling, from 1976 to 1996, people should have said, 'We are so successful, we are inevitably going to spawn our own competition. What should we be doing now to prepare for that?' " said Perskie, now a retired judge. "But they didn't do that. They never looked beyond the next quarter."
The Trump Taj Mahal (far left) is expected to file for bankruptcy while the Showboat Casino (2nd from right) and Revel Casino (far right) have closed their doors.Photo: AP
More pain may be on the way if casinos open up in North Jersey or Manhattan. Yet if there is hope, it's that everyone in town finally sees what went wrong: In its over-reliance on gambling, Atlantic City strayed from its roots.
"There's one word to describe the key to Atlantic City's success the first time around: spectacle," Johnson said. "They staged all sorts of silly things, whether it was dog races or cat boxing matches or the diving horse. Anything that would draw a crowd."
The city is slowly returning to those exhibitionist sensibilities. Conventional Hall has been refurbished and is again hosting the Miss America pageant. Plans to build the largest Ferris wheel on the East Coast on Steel Pier are currently underway. A Bass Pro Shops megastore is set to join an outlet mall downtown. A children's museum should open at the newly renovated Claridge Hotel next May. The list of current and coming attractions goes on.
Or maybe Atlantic City residents can simply find solace in the words of the ultimate Jersey Shore guy, Bruce Springsteen, who penned a song named after their town in 1982, just as the last revival was taking hold.
"Everything dies, baby, that's a fact," Springsteen sang. "But maybe everything that dies someday comes back."
Brad Parks is a Shamus-, Nero- and Lefty-winning author of crime fiction, most recently "The Player" (St. Martin's Press).
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