Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America [Paperback]

Bryant Simon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0195308093 | ISBN-13: 978-0195308099

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.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Product Description
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.

Review

"Perhaps the finest book ever written about Atlantic City, an....incisive history of the tension between the "resort" and the less-glitzy urban reality tourists rush past."--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"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."--The Chicago Tribune

"Professor Bryant is onto something here, and it is refreshing....a sober look at urban degeneration and regeneration against the backdrop of a changing nation enjoying its post-World War II prosperity, and a burgeoning middle class eager to parade its riches on the Boardwalk."-- The New York Times

"Simon's love for the city and its history is clear...[he] masterfully recreates [a] lost world full of music, whimsy, culture, and style." -- Times-Picayune

"For historians interested in the intersection of race and class in the 20th century, this work is a must read."--CHOICE

"This enviably sparkling book is more a work of the scholarly journalist than the typical fare of academic urban history.... Simon's themes are presented in a model of narrative detail and memorable images."--Journal of Social History

"Boardwalk of Dreams is passionately argued, and Simon writes of his own personal connection to Atlantic City with sincerity but not sentimentality.... This is a very entertaining read, a fact which may distract readers from Simon's serious call to rethink the city's past."--Urban History Review

"For historians interested in the intersection of race and class in the 20th century, this work is a must read."--CHOICE

"Simon has added a somewhat grandiose subtitle to his book on Atlantic City, New Jersey, thus declaring his intention not only to narrate the story of this famous site but also to make it a metaphor for the U.S. urban crisis of the twentieth century. Simon actually succeeds quite well in making this case. This is a very fine book. The prose is excellent, the thesis is clear, and the evidence is well marshaled." --American Historical Review

"...a fascinating and well-written book chockfull of detail." --Journal of Popular Culture

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (April 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195308093
• ISBN-13: 978-0195308099
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #410,970 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bryant Simon is professor of history and the Director of American Studies at Temple University. He is the author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America. His most recent book, Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks, looks at what our latte choices tell us about our daily desires and dreams. This research took him to more than 450 Starbucks in 10 countries.

He blogs at www.everythingbutthecoffee.net

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 11, 2004

By 

reviewer (new orleans, la USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (Hardcover)

No one can deny that casinos have brought money and crowds back to

Atlantic City. Since the first casino opened in 1978, gambling

corporations have invested six billion dollars in the old resort town

and, during the 1990s, more tourists visited Atlantic City than any

other place in the United States including Las Vegas and Disneyworld.

Each year, the city entertains twice the population of metropolitan New

York and those visitors "wager almost enough money to fund the nation's

space program." During the past quarter century, the casinos have

generated eighty percent of the city's total property taxes, five and a

half billion tax dollars for the state, and created over 42,000 new

jobs.

Despite these impressive numbers, in "Boardwalk of Dreams" Bryant Simon

concludes that "the gaming industry has not saved Atlantic City."

Instead, he finds that bringing casinos to the New Jersey shore was a

"devil's bargain." Twenty-six years of gaming, he argues, have left the

city in many ways worse off than it was in the mid-1970s when it was a

decaying, honky tonk resort whose best days had long passed. Today,

Simon maintains, Atlantic City is a dysfunctional place with a jarring

landscape of fortress-like casinos surrounded by boarded storefronts and

derelict houses. Only a few blocks from Donald Trump's "gaudy and

gilded showplace" the Taj Mahal, "are some of the loneliest, most

desolate streets in America."

For Simon, an urban historian at Temple University in Philadelphia, the

story of Atlantic City is a colorful but heartbreaking tale. Long known

as the "Queen of American Resorts,"Atlantic City grew famous in the

first half of the twentieth century as the premier vacation destination

for the middle class. Using a formula later perfected by Las Vegas, the

city's hotels offered exotic architecture and elaborate amenities at a

moderate cost. Salesmen and bookkeepers luxuriated with their families

in lobbies filled with overstuffed chairs, chandeliers, and Chippendale

furniture, but then retreated to rooms that they could afford. At night,

Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Dean Martin, Louie Prima, and Louis

Armstrong provided stylish entertainment to crowds with moderate

incomes. Vacationers donned their flashiest outfits, paraded down the

boardwalk, and proved to the world that they had made it. As an escapist

retreat for the middle class, Simon writes, Atlantic City "was

Disneyland a generation before there was a Disneyland."

Away from the beach, along the streets with names that the board game

Monopoly made famous, the city's working class residents also thrived.

Although Atlantic City was built as tourist destination, generations of

Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants from Europe, and African-

Americans from the South, had come to find jobs. They created

tightly-knit neighborhoods filled with corner groceries, ethnic

restaurants, neighborhood taverns, and long rows of houses with porches

where families sat on summer evenings. It was a place where people

walked to work, to worship, to visit friends, and to shop. Like many

urban historians who lament the passing of the old "walking cities,"

Simon lauds the rich cultural and social life of these now vanished

neighborhoods.

In the Italian neighborhood known as Ducktown, Simon writes, "locals

could find three bakeries selling warm, crusty loaves Of Italian Bread."

"Next door were fruit stands and fish markets. Nearby grocery stores

sold milk and eggs, roasted peppers and imported Parmesan cheese.

Around the corner, sandwich makers built long Italian hoagies made out

of lettuce, tomatoes, onions, provolone, Genoa salami,...and hot red

peppers. Neighborhood tailors and barbers played scratchy opera records

and decorated their walls with pictures of the pope and Frank Sinatra.

Ducktown restaurants served big bowls of gnocchi with garlicky marinara

sauce and stubby glasses of homemade wine. Above the eateries and

stores were social clubs likes the Knights of Columbus and the Al-Ki

Club where men who spoke only Italian played nickel and dime games of

hearts."

But even during its golden era when this social fabric was intact, the

city was not without flaws. In order to make the boardwalk a fantasy

world for middle-class whites, Atlantic City was a Jim Crow town.

Police harassed African-Americans who tried to swim at the white beach.

Restaurants refused to serve black tourists or demanded exorbitant

prices from them. When black families tried to check into the famous

hotels, desk managers claimed their reservations had been lost. By

making black tourists feel unwelcome, businessmen and police made sure

the only African-Americans on the "boardwalk of dreams" were bellhops,

entertainers, cooks, and the men who pushed the wicker rickshaws in

which white tourists rode. Even the businesses along Atlantic Avenue

where year-round residents shopped were for whites only.

African-Americans patronized the stores on Arctic Avenue in the black

section of town.

It was no coincidence, Simon contends, that the decline in white middle

class tourism coincided with civil rights activists' successful efforts

to end Atlantic City's de facto segregation during the late 1950s and

1960s. Worried that Atlantic City was "now unmanageable and out of

control, the accountants and clerks who had in the past spent their

summers in town...went into hiding in segregated suburbs, malls, movie

theaters, amusement parks, and outdoor worlds." Many white year-round

residents left town as well.

"White flight" exacerbated other challenges the city faced. With the

advent of air conditioning, television, and backyard swimming pools,

fewer families flocked to the ocean each summer. Cheap airfares allowed

the middle class access to new, distant destinations. "As the white

tourists stayed away," Simon writes, "fancy Boardwalk jewelry stores

turned into hot dog stands." The boardwalk grew increasingly seedy and

soon the black middle class stayed away as well. Crowds still gathered

for the Miss America Pageant each September, and the Shriners still came

for conventions and salt-water taffy, but by the 1970s Atlantic City had

become synonymous with urban decay. It was hardly a place to go to

escape the cares of the world. "Without respectable, well-dressed

crowds," Simon maintains, "Atlantic City lost its ability to host

nightly reenactments of the American Dream of upward mobility, and when

that happened, the cycle of decline was on a vicious, unrelenting

course."

As the situation grew more desperate in the 1970s, city leaders

increasingly viewed casino gambling as a panacea. They had watched

enviously for decades as gaming transformed Las Vegas into a boomtown

and they were certain they could mimic that success. Vegas, after all,

was in the middle of the Nevada desert. Atlantic City was an ocean

front resort situated amidst millions of potential gamblers in New York,

Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.

In 1976, New Jersey voters approved casino gambling in Atlantic City.

Confident that jobs and glittering prosperity were on the way, joyful

residents in the city's working class neighborhoods literally danced in

the streets. "Everyone," one local leader recalled, "was a millionaire

that night." Curtis Kugel, the owner of a venerable Atlantic City

seafood restaurant, spoke for many when he predicted that his town would

"turn around and be what it was in the twenties and thirties." The

"boardwalk of dreams" would be reborn.

When the first casino opened two years later, such hopes quickly faded.

Most of the jobs created by the casinos went to non-residents. Because

casino managers did not want employees competing with gamblers for

parking spaces, they built "intercept lots" outside of town and bused

employees from their cars to their jobs. As result, few workers "ever

stepped foot on Atlantic City streets" and "there was little chance for

any of the casino riches to trickle down into the city."

Restaurateurs and amusement pier operators who hoped to feed and

entertain giant crowds also found disappointment. It soon became

apparent that the new tourists seldom left the casinos. Gamblers lined

up at casino buffets instead. And casino architects fashioned their

buildings in a manner that made access to the boardwalk and beach

difficult. Casino patrons remained sealed in a windowless, clockless

maze of slot machines until their money ran out and tour operators

herded them back onto buses.

Atlantic City's ethnic neighborhoods also suffered. Speculators and

casino corporations bought houses in those... Read more ›

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stranger (and better) than fiction., August 27, 2007

By 

Yaakov (James) Mosher (Connecticut, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (Paperback)

If you're searching for gripping non-fiction, look no further. "Boardwalk of Dreams" is almost as mesmerizing as a Caesars Palace slot machine.

History Professor Bryant Simon superbly links the fate of Atlantic City to what happened in other urban areas -- blight and flight that culminated in the 1960s. The recurring theme of exclusion in what are assumed to be "public" places is illuminating. Simon unveils a cross-section of pettiness, greed, and corruption close to the heart of the American dream that is sobering.

The author, a New Jersey native, leaves no stone unturned in bulldozing the myth of casino gambling as "magic bullet." The casinos didn't ruin Atlantic City but neither did they revive the city (which was, as Simon shows, predictable since casinos offer exclusion and isolation to relax their customers and keep them coming back).

Depressed areas and struggling industries should read and heed Simon. Horse-racing track operators currently have stars in their eyes about the "necessity" of "expanded gaming" the way many in Atlantic City did in 1976. (In fact -- a fact not mentioned in "Boardwalk of Dreams" -- Atlantic City slot machines supply the purse, or prize, money for races run at New Jersey's Monmouth Park and Meadowlands racetracks). Racing people, especially horsemen's associations, are on track to wake up with a big hangover some day.

The desegregation of Atlantic City and accompanying white exodus is well-documented by Simon. It's undoubtedly true but sad to contemplate just the same. The most recent similar example from history is what happened in South Africa after blacks got the right to vote in the 1990s. Pent-up demand for the blessings of liberty among blacks is unleashed. Some whites view this as unsettling and begin edging toward the door. Some blacks think things aren't moving fast enough and begin stealing etc. (thereby giving freedom a bad name). Whites fight back and/or move to safer ground. Terribly unfortunate and completely impervious to any legislative "solutions." One is left wishing for a divine "Patience" button (similar to the Staples Inc. "Easy" button) that could be pressed to prevent future chains of events along the lines of what happened to Atlantic City.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sad tale of an American city, April 19, 2010

By 

S. Sourelis (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (Paperback)

Spaces became less public, as in the Atlantic City Boardwalk, and more private, as in TV watching in the suburban home, and later, in gambling casinos . Atlantic City flourished on seeing others and being seen in public in one's best clothes, as people did once they became middle class. As society became more consumer oriented, people became less public oriented. When Atlantic City hotels and attractions began to decay from lack of upkeep, more and more, people stayed away, sometimes traveling to the new Disneyland in California on the newly affordable airlines. The role of Jim Crow segregation is mentioned as being a significant part of what made Atlantic City. It allowed Caucasian people to see African Americans in the subservient role of cart pushers, for example. There are accounts from residents about what they consider the good old days. The Boardwalk of Dreams was substituted for Casinos of Dreams. It seems as if the city has not been able to flourish on that new dream as it had before.