My great-great-uncle Benny, according to family lore, took the rap for Nucky Johnson. In “Boardwalk Empire,” Nucky is the city’s treasurer, immortalized by Steve Buscemi and his rubber-cement cheekbones; in real life, during the Prohibition, he was the sheriff who ruled Atlantic City, and Uncle Benny was one of his lackeys. Other members of my family were more naïvely involved in Atlantic City’s underbelly: my grandmother, as a child, innocently carried chits from bookies to guests in her family’s hotel. But, despite the seamy side, my older relatives remember the city as a thrilling place, with its diving horses and Tony Grant’s Stars of Tomorrow.
When Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption,” in 1899, Americans already loved to travel. Vacations were once a privilege for the wealthiest, but by the turn of the century cheaper and faster railroads opened up tourism to the middle class. Atlantic City was in the right place at the right time. Through the early nineteen-sixties, it was the Eastern seaboard’s go-to summer resort: a short train ride from New York City and Philadelphia, the town offered affordable entertainment for everyone. By the nineteen-seventies, though, Atlantic City had lost its purpose. If you wanted fun, you could fly to Las Vegas; if you wanted a breeze, you could crank up the air-conditioning. In 1976, New Jersey passed a bill that legalized casino gambling in Atlantic City, which helped, but not enough. By the time I was growing up there, in the nineties, little remained of the glamorous place my grandparents remembered. My brother and I used to count the cash-for-gold stores along Pacific Avenue; we once identified eighteen of them in four blocks.
Now Atlantic City risks losing even its modest status as a regional gambling center. Over the past couple of years, Pennsylvania and Delaware have legalized gambling. In 2012, Pennsylvania became the second-largest gambling market in the United States, behind Las Vegas and surpassing Atlantic City. And, this month, New York approved an amendment to allow seven casinos in the state. Since 2006, Atlantic City casino revenue has fallen by more than forty-one per cent, from more than five billion dollars to three billion last year. With gambling legalized in the surrounding states, Atlantic City casinos have lost much of their pull: Why travel an hour and a half if you can lose money in your own backyard?
Two years ago, the casinos of Atlantic City pooled together to fund the nonprofit marketing organization Atlantic City Alliance, meant to persuade people that the town is good for more than gambling. This is how the Alliance describes Atlantic City: “From sandals to stilettos and foie gras to funnel cakes, Atlantic City offers something for everyone.” (It’s a little hard to picture exactly what’s supposed to be going on: Paris meets the Iowa State Fair?) And, in April of 2012, the Alliance announced a new slogan for Atlantic City: “Do AC.” That phrase, which supplants “Always Turned On,” which had earlier replaced “America’s Favorite Playground,” seems crafted to mean pretty much whatever you want. The city hopes that a new online-gambling law in New Jersey—which requires online platforms to partner with physical casinos within state lines—will help boost gaming revenues. But “Do AC” also promotes a vision of Atlantic City as a resort destination beyond night life and casinos. If the city can only attract more tourists, the thinking goes, perhaps real-estate developers will follow, building housing and entertainment complexes in the city’s many vacant lots that will, in turn, attract even more tourists.
Six months after Atlantic City announced the “Do AC” campaign, Hurricane Sandy grazed the city. Though the storm ripped up sections of the boardwalk, the main structure remained sound. The media coverage of Sandy’s damage to the Jersey Shore focussed largely on Seaside Heights, of MTV fame, which was more thoroughly wrecked. Hurricane Sandy’s damage to Atlantic City has been as much psychological as physical: though the city promises it is in fine condition, and open for business, tourists still seem skeptical.
Atlantic City’s newest casino, a 2.4-billion-dollar glass behemoth called Revel, was conceived as a luxury resort destination. Revel is distinguished—if you can call it that—by a white sphere, the world’s largest pinball, balancing on top. But in February of 2013, a little over a year after opening its doors, Revel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (In May, the casino completed Chapter 11 restructuring.) The luxury model didn’t attract enough visitors to make up for the over-all slump in gaming revenues. Now Revel is trying to attract more people with features such as the “DigiPit,” a performance space on the gambling floor where acrobats writhe and tumble in front of the people playing on digital gaming machines.
On November 5th, Don Guardian upset the incumbent Lorenzo Langford to become the city’s first Republican mayor since 1984. He is hopeful about its prospects. “What Atlantic City does best is reinvent itself,” he told me. Guardian agrees that Atlantic City should go beyond gambling; he described a long-term vision that includes an Epcot-like “world bazaar” that would celebrate the town’s diversity, with Indian food, African art, and an R. & B. museum. But that’s still far in the future. Meanwhile, the Atlantic City Alliance offers plenty of suggestions for things that business travellers and families can do once they get to Atlantic City—the Convention Hall, Gardner’s Basin, the Film Festival—but none of them are really compelling reasons to go. The casinos aren’t spectacular enough to be an attraction on their own, and the hotels and piers from the forties have literally crumbled. Atlantic City might try to dress itself up as a glitzy club destination or a family-friendly haven, but the truth is that the town has to offer what it has always offered: a beach, a boardwalk, and some places to gamble. Once upon a time, that sounded like a lot.
Photograph by Michael Perez for The Washington Post via Getty
Adrienne Raphel
from Currency http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/11/what-happened-to-atlantic-city.html
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