Copyright 2004 Chicago Tribune Company

Utopia lost;
A historian follows a gritty trail in tracking the rise and fall of Atlantic City

By Jane Dailey. Jane Dailey is associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and the author of "Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Post emancipation Virginia."


Twenty-something and trying to kick his smoking habit, Bryant Simon used to ride his bike down the Boardwalk in Atlantic City during the early 1980s. Where others saw the ocean, Simon saw the buildings and the people. Appropriately enough for the future historian (today a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia), Simon's eye was caught by "the remnants of the past," the outlines of the Warner Theater and the great piers. But the present was never out of sight: The out-of-breath cyclist always slowed down when he came across Celestine Tate Harrington, who--unable to move arms or legs--lay on a gurney outside Bally's Park Place Casino and played "Amazing Grace" on an electric organ with the tip of her tongue.

Emblematic of the city's dire poverty and its identity as a source of public entertainment, Harrington is an apt representative of Atlantic City's transformation from what a writer for the New Republic called " 'the American Utopia' " in 1920 to its current parody of the American Dream. A beach, a boardwalk and finally a city, during its heyday between the two world wars, Atlantic City "reigned as the Queen of Resorts and the 'nation's playground,' " Simon writes. "It hosted tens of millions of people each year. Its hotels were the largest in the world, and it was home to the world's longest boardwalk, the only one spelled with a capital B."

Saltwater taffy and the Miss America Pageant were invented in Atlantic City, and Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin first teamed up there. Decked out in their mink coats and pleated linen pants, the striver descendants of the great European immigration of the late 19th Century every summer traded their apartments and row houses in Baltimore and Philadelphia for boarding rooms and beach cottages, jamming the Boardwalk on their way to check out the latest Chevrolet at the General Motors exhibit, or to see the diving-horse act at the end of the Steel Pier. At night the more adventurous could venture beyond Atlantic Avenue to the Midway, where they could "slip their own skin" in the Paradise Club, titillated by exotic black dancers and "[c]ampy pansy acts and drag shows."

There was a lot to do in Atlantic City, between the beach and the Boardwalk and the hotels. But the biggest draw, says Simon, were the rolling chairs, rickshaw-like wicker thrones occupied by white tourists and pushed, before 1965, exclusively by black men. A ride aboard these " 'temples of contentment' " announced one's position as a white person of substance, and provided an opportunity to act out racial hierarchy in public. "Atlantic City's ability to stage this public performance of racial dominance, conspicuous consumption, class leveling [for whites], and social climbing," Simon argues, "turned the resort into one of the single most popular tourist destinations in America between 1915 and 1965."

On and around the Boardwalk, new Americans on their way up--Jews from Eastern Europe, Italians and Sicilians, Greeks and Slavs and Hungarians, the children of immigrant ditch diggers and steelworkers--could inhabit and act out the strange American concept of whiteness. The doting service doled out to whites in Atlantic City was explicitly racialized, and Simon suggests that white people went there, in part, to experience the rush of segregation. "The ability of Atlantic City's tourist merchants to produce middle-class dreams of democratic ascent alongside racial and class exclusion was the reason that tens of millions of Americans flocked to the Jersey resort in the middle of the twentieth century," Simon writes. "During its heyday, the city sold an explicit racial fantasy."

This fantasy depended on keeping non-whites in the shadows. The city's tourist areas were firmly Jim-Crowed, and racial interactions there were policed far more than was the norm for most Northern cities in the years leading up to the civil rights movement. African-American residents were hemmed into a virtually all-black, over-crowded and under serviced neighborhood well away from the hotels. Non-white tourists were unwelcome in the new resort areas: They were barred from white hotels, kept off the Boardwalk and away from all but one beach area, and con-fined to the crow's nests of movie theaters.

But Atlantic City was not Atlanta. Atlantic City's black residents voted--even if their ballots were marked "C" for "colored." Their city's only high school, built in the 1920s, was integrated--even if the built-in pool never opened out of fear of unseemly race-mixing. Beginning in the 1930s, local black residents (many of whom belonged to the NAACP) fought Jim Crow on a number of levels, integrating previously all-white neighborhoods in the 1940s and '50s, and picketing Woolworth's in 1960. For all they chafed against the strictures of "northern-style segregation," African-Americans who turned up in Atlantic City during the height of Jim Crow did not mistake South Jersey for South Carolina.

The contradictions between the racial fantasy sold on the Boardwalk and the urban racial politics brewing backstage became, by the 1960s, impossible to reconcile. By the late '60s, Atlantic City was no longer known for its over-the-top resort architecture or its promenading, dressed-to-the-nines tourists. The city, Simon explains, "had become a poster child for urban blight and decay." Journalists "compared it to bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut."

Many factors contributed to the obsolescence of Atlantic City's version of "the American Utopia" and to the erosion of the city that supported it: the growth of affordable air travel (which made the beaches of Florida and the Caribbean accessible to the white petite bourgeoisie), air conditioning (beside which cool ocean breezes wilted) and television, which encouraged people to stay home or, if they wanted to go someplace new, to enter the world on their screens via Cinderella's castle in Disneyland.

But what really killed tourism in the city was white reaction to black visitors. Complying with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Atlantic City's hotels began to desegregate. At the same time, hotel owners, who apparently considered black patrons "symbols of decline" rather than "members of a new, potentially lucrative market," cut back on the upkeep of their properties. The shabbiness of the Boardwalk, combined with its new integrated clientele, convinced many whites that " 'the tone of the Boardwalk' " had changed irrevocably, and they began to stay away. With white tourism in decline, the many businesses it supported--the restaurants, the clubs, the movie theaters, the rooming houses--suffered as well. And the neighborhoods anchored by those businesses, and the families that ran them, stagnated and then began to disintegrate. Corners that had once been places for families and neighbors to meet became the territory of drug dealers. "By the early 1970s," Simon writes, "the Queen of Resorts had, according to federal statistics, become a crime capital." Atlantic City had the highest crime rate of any city its size in the country. Urban-renewal schemes that centered on the destruction of ethnic neighborhoods left nothing but gaping holes in the increasingly desolate cityscape. White tourists and residents alike voted with their feet and abandoned the city.

This mass exodus propelled Atlantic City into a downward spiral from which it has yet to recover. In its experience of civil rights-era white flight, Atlantic City shared the fate of every American city with an appreciable black population. But as "the first city in the country built from scratch and devoted entirely to the production and public consumption of entertainment," Atlantic City was even more economically vulnerable than Rust Belt dinosaurs like Detroit and Milwaukee. America's playground depended on revelry. How could it persuade people to come back and play?

The answer seemed to be to combine old tactics of racial segregation (or, failing that, erasure), with the new potential of gambling, approved for Atlantic City in 1976. The first casinos opened in 1978. The hope that casinos would somehow be the salvation of the city has turned out to be simply another fiction peddled by tourism entrepreneurs, however. Designed explicitly to wall out the city (and its largely non-white residents), the casinos turned their backs on the Boardwalk as well. The bulk of the 50,000 casino workers live in the suburbs and spend their wages there. People movers built right over the Boardwalk ensure that gamblers do not stumble accidentally upon the city and, perchance, spend some money in one of its few remaining restaurants. A tunnel--built with municipal tax dollars--under the city channels cars and buses straight to the Vegas-style Borgata casino-resort, thus ensuring that visitors to Atlantic City may bypass it entirely. The ultimate effect of all this on the city has been to create "twelve separate, inward-looking casino villages that leave only crumbs on the Monopoly streets around them."

A gifted writer as well as a clear-eyed historian, Simon moves effortlessly in "Boardwalk of Dreams" between the fantasies that Atlantic City sold and the social, economic and political worlds that underlay them. The result is a lively, evocative, eminently readable book that looks beyond the Jersey beach town to the inner pulse of urban America. "Purged of nostalgia," Simon argues, the story of Atlantic City is necessarily a story about the enduring appeal of racial segregation to white Americans and is, therefore, "a story about the possibilities and limits of American democracy."

Social theorists may question some of Simon's assumptions about public space and exclusion as they relate to Atlantic City. (Can we, for instance, treat the commodification of exclusion as the same thing as exclusion itself?) But every reader entranced by Simon's gritty story will also have to come to terms with his provocative and searing arguments about the rise and fall of this peculiar "American Utopia."