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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