The East Coast version of Las Vegas? No. Atlantic City’s front part, the main casino part, is oh, so different. This is a boardwalk kind of town, and that prevents the showy spectacle that slides through the Las Vegas Strip all day and all night.
So the evening brings no parade of obscenely long limos, or rap-blasting Mustangs, or dazzled spectators gathering to watch a volcano erupt, pirates battle or fountains dance.
A boardwalk isn’t for vehicles of any kind, except those rickshaws pushed (not pulled) by men with strong arms — conveyances properly called “rolling chairs.” They used to be elegant and made of wicker. Now they sport metal sides and advertisements. Take one all the way from the Showboat to the Hilton — the equivalent of 26 blocks — and the man with the arms will want $20 for one or two people and expect a tip. A ride half that long costs half as much, which is about as fair as things get in a gambler’s town.
This is that sort of town, make no mistake. It isn’t quite so blatant about it as Vegas, because the betting palaces cannot face one another across frenzied blacktop, the way they do out West. They line a boardwalk (properly known as The Boardwalk), and on the other side is a beach, then the ocean that gave the town its name. After that, it’s Portugal.
At night, the casinos put on a happy neon face for the strollers and the passengers in roller chairs to see. But face east and there looms the darkness of 4,000 miles. This is a half-lit city.
I walked The Boardwalk for a couple of afternoons before the busy season, days when wind flattened the beach grass and clouds refused to budge. Here and there, people leaned against railings and stared moodily out to sea. Gulls made the most noise as they muscled past pigeons to get at the free buffet of an upturned rice bowl outside a Chinese restaurant.
“Where’s the cowboy place?” a woman demanded. My green jacket must have looked to her like an official greeter’s uniform.
Probably she meant Wild Wild West, a casino with brightly painted facades meant to look the way Dodge City would have if populated largely by window dressers.
I gestured vaguely behind me, northward. The woman nodded and left. Actually, the shoreline slants, so I really sent the woman striding off toward the northeast with her little plastic cup of nickels. But “north” is sufficient. Urban areas dominated by the gaming industry are confusing enough. (And don’t get me started on the board game Monopoly. What’s left of the town that inspired its iconography are street names and a popular new slot machine festooned with giant dice.)
If memory serves, Wild Wild West was a part of Bally’s, which merged with Hilton, which is near Trump’s Castle — recently sold to Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts (huh?). Harrah’s now owns Showboat and also operates a large hotel/casino out by the marina and far from The Boardwalk. Next door to Harrah’s-by-the-Marina is an enormous construction site, where a Mirage resort with a French theme and a Boyd’s resort with an Italian theme soon may or may not appear.
My head was starting to ache. Here on a largely deserted, wind-swept waterfront, where gaps between casinos are filled with mom-and-pop pizza joints and purveyors of hot dogs and saltwater taffy, how could anyone contemplate the maneuvers of gaming industry giants?
We have people who do this. Watch the business sections.
All I knew was a report I saw in a recent issue of that gambler’s bible, Casino Player magazine. It reported that 37 million people visited Atlantic City in 1998, 5 million more than went to Las Vegas. Last September, the 13 Atlantic City casinos pulled in $345.9 million, while the 25 casinos on the Las Vegas Strip reaped $301.3 million.
So why are we treating this town as some kind of gambling Second City?
Well, for one thing, Las Vegas gaming includes more than the Strip. Casinos also operate downtown and out on the periphery. And probably a majority of those 37 million who hit the New Jersey shore get counted more than once. They arrive in busloads from New York, Philadelphia and other parts of the Eastern Seaboard, go home the same night, lick their wounds for a week or two and then come back. Or they make a weekend of it and, later in the same year, make another weekend of it.
Apparently, I was strolling in the wrong place to get a true sense of the city’s power. Beyond the casinos, I could glimpse decrepit houses, entire neighborhoods reduced to vacant lots, many stores with posters pointing out “WE BUY GOLD.”
This did not look promising. But several billboards scattered in various places reassured me: “Atlantic City’s got a great future. (We’ve seen the plans.)” Signed Mirage Resorts.
Most of the cash-flow producers aren’t leaning on Boardwalk railings or loading up on funnel cakes; they’re working the slot machines and craps tables. I picked a casino at random, walked in and found people standing or sitting shoulder to shoulder playing games of chance. Motor coaches full of gamblers disappear into cavernous unloading areas, where they can get to the action without ever encountering a rolling chair, sea gull or taffy pull. Same sort of deal for those who drive their cars. Parking garages shunt patrons right into the hotels and form a secondary skyline along Atlantic Avenue.
I walked into another casino, then another. Same thing. They became indistinguishable. They hardly bother with themes, a la the new “family oriented” Vegas, and Atlantic City has kept non-gambling distractions to a minimum.
Well, I did notice a bit of a story line inside the Tropicana, where a neon sign proclaimed “Las Vegas by the Sea,” and small neon versions of Cowboy Vic and Cowgirl Sally — the familiar downtown Las Vegas landmarks — loomed over the slots. Is the Trop hedging its bets? Last time I visited its western branch, I didn’t notice any signage that said “Atlantic City by the McCullough Range.”
Themes seem half-hearted, at best. Trump’s Taj Mahal has a few turrets. Showboat Casino tricks up some street-level facades with wrought iron balconies and purple and gold bunting to support its claim of “Mardi Gras Every Day.” (I imagined there might be a permanent notice posted inside that says “Lent Begins Tomorrow.”)
I set out by car to explore the city. Yes, board-gamers, there is a Baltic Avenue and a Park Place. The Miss America culture now works its magic over by the new Convention Center, where plaques honoring former winners lead past a statue of Bert Parks, the late, great pageant emcee. Artifacts of pageants past fill the new Sheraton Hotel nearby. Factoid: The first Miss America, crowned in 1921, was Miss Margaret Gorman of Washington, D.C.
Atlantic City had to be a different kind of place back then. It got its name in 1854, according to local historians, because it was the last rail stop between Philadelphia and the sea. It got its boardwalk (now 60 feet wide and 6 miles long) because resort owners tired of sweeping sand out of their lobbies.
The Steel Pier, still jutting from shore with its load of carnival rides, once was known as the “Showplace of the Nation.” With casinos now booking the likes of Celine Dion, Vanessa Williams, George Carlin and Jay Leno, the Steel Pier isn’t even the showplace of Atlantic City anymore.
Stars came out in the old days, too, the summer old days, when audiences flocked to the beaches and filled up nightclubs, pierside concert venues and hotel showrooms.
Then came talkies, radio, TV, air travel and Las Vegas. Atlantic City went into decline, to put the situation mildly. It spent the World War II years as a military base. In 1978, to boost Atlantic City’s rapidly declining fortunes, New Jersey legalized casino gambling in that town only.
The hotel where I stayed, Resorts Casino, reportedly was the oldest still standing on the Boardwalk. Formerly the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall, it once belonged to Hollywood hotel and game-show mogul Merv Griffin, but South Africa-based Sun International bought it a couple of years ago.
Griffin hasn’t always been lucky in the casino business, but two of the game shows he created, “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune,” now serve as the theme for ranks of slot machines wherever gamblers drop quarters. That licensing arrangement alone must keep him out of red ink.
Anyway, Griffin definitely was the boss when, as a sign outside the Resorts lobby boasts, “This is where it all began.”
Sunk in the tiles by the front doors are the handprints of Perry Como, Liberace, Rodney Dangerfield, Glen Campbell, Dolly Parton and a host of other Las Vegas-level headliners.
The rest of the city still seems less than dazzling, however, although Bettie Givens — manager of the city’s history museum on Garden Pier — insisted that things keep looking up. Sure, visitors see long stretches of vacant lots, and some beautiful old apartment buildings stand empty and boarded up. But notice the new gray-framed housing complexes that appear here and there, the recreation centers, the slow renovation of Absecon Lighthouse, that new convention center/hotel complex, where the Miss America Pageant heart beats still.
“The old part of the main city is gone, but that old part had become so awful that the only way Atlantic City could survive was by casino gambling coming into town and giving everybody jobs,” Givens declared. “If you want a job in Atlantic City, you can find it. You may not be starting at $20 an hour, but there is one.”
Givens told me that members of the museum board all are top civic leaders, “people that care about Atlantic City and want to preserve its memories. We’re such a throwaway society. We tear everything down and throw everything away. I remember years ago when Mom’s toaster broke and Dad took it to the hardware store to get it fixed. Now we throw everything away.”
I went looking for something old that hadn’t been thrown away and found it in Margate, one of the handsome suburbs that follow the shoreline south of the Boardwalk. Shaking loose from downtown brings a sense of relief. It is depressing. And yet I had the uneasy feeling that my sitting in the car, instead of a casino, was slowing down the revenue stream and delaying the city’s promised Golden Age even further.
Then I saw my talisman of hope on the horizon. It would have been hard to miss her. Lucy dominated the Margate skyline, an enormous elephant, 65 feet tall, a former promotional stunt, a hotel and amusement complex that has been carefully preserved to look as it did when real estate go-getter James V. Lafferty built it in 1881.
Lucy stares out to sea, as if to defy the forces of progress that have knocked down so many other wonderful follies in Atlantic City and environs.
And I particularly noticed that Lucy had been painted a proper elephant color. Gray, not white.
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For more information about Atlantic City, contact the Atlantic City Convention and Visitors Authority, 2314 Pacific Avenue, Atlantic City, NJ 08401 (609-348-7100; fax: 609-345-3685).
Robert Cross’ e-mail address is bcross@tribune.com.
