Nelson Johnson - Boardwalk Empire - The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City

Improvement in personal transportation turned the leisure industry into big business. All across the country new vacation centers sprang up, competing for tourists’ dollars. In contrast, Atlantic City wasn’t accustomed to competing for visitors and was anything but modern. The Boardwalk, hotels, shops, restaurants, and the city itself were all showing signs of aging and being dated. Atlantic City had lost its appeal, and its patrons were lured away to newer attractions. As one national news magazine observed, “Today, aside from the conventioneers, the typical Atlantic City tourist is either poor, Black, elderly, or all three—and the change has depressed almost every aspect of the city’s economy … the picture which emerges is one of steady physical, economic, and social deterioration.”

Compounding the threat posed by increased competition was the response of the business community and city planners. During its prosperous years there had developed a “core area” within the city, which traditionally had an 8- to 10-month economy. The area bounded by the Boardwalk and Virginia, Atlantic, and Arkansas Avenues contained a heavy concentration of family-owned and -operated hotels, boardinghouses, restaurants, and shops. It was the most vital section of the town. Within this 20-square-block portion of the city there were hundreds of prosperous family businesses. These families were the people who had built the resort’s hotel and recreation industry. This core was the backbone of the economy, providing a majority of the jobs and paying the bulk of the real estate taxes.

In an attempt to capture a greater portion of the market traveling in cars, the city permitted real estate developers to construct new motels along the highways into town and other parts of the city outside of the core area. It was the traditional Atlantic City response, “Give ’em what they want.” But the decision was shortsighted and contributed to siphoning off customers from the core area. The new motels made money at first, but there weren’t enough customers to go around, and over the long haul, everybody lost.

The owners of the hotels and boardinghouses within the core area saw the gradual decline. For several generations their families had cultivated regular customers from throughout the Northeast. They were proud of the service they provided and went out of the way to please their guests, making an effort to satisfy individual tastes and wants. Hoteliers kept lists of their regular patrons and did such things as send greeting cards during the holidays in winter months and special invitations as the summer season was starting up. Each hotel and boardinghouse had its own dining room and amenities peculiar to it. It might be just a pleasant front porch or an intimate cocktail lounge, or a grand ballroom or indoor swimming pool, but each one had its own special character.

A large percentage of Atlantic City’s visitors were repeats who enjoyed returning each summer to the familiar surroundings of their favorite hotel. Year after year these patrons vacationed at the resort. It was common for one generation to follow the other and return to the same hotel where they had vacationed as children with the family. But the world changed and Atlantic City didn’t, and as these children became adults, they began to view the resort as second rate. When the core area businessmen noticed the fall off of repeat customers they grew uneasy. When things didn’t improve, they panicked. By the late ’50s and into the ’60s many of the local hotel owners began selling out. The owners knew that as the number of visitors dwindled, their town would eventually fade into oblivion. They were going to get out before things got worse.

The resort’s third- and fourth-generation hotelkeepers were replaced by investors from out-of-town who still believed in Atlantic City’s reputation as a national resort. They got an unpleasant surprise. The volume of patrons they had expected wasn’t there. The response of these new hotelkeepers was to slash the overhead. The first thing to go were the hotel dining rooms. Many of the new proprietors did not have the experience needed to turn a profit on serving meals, so they did away with them. This robbed the small hotels of their individuality, contributing further to their decline. The offseason months became slower and slower, and despite past practice, the new owners couldn’t justify remaining open year-round. Their operations were curtailed, with a majority of the small hotels and boardinghouses closing down in October and not reopening until May. The core area no longer had a year-round economy. The backbone of the economy was broken.

The hotels not only became antiquated but fell into neglect. Shrinking profits meant less money for maintenance. Vacationers who travel to a resort expect something more than what they have at home, but Atlantic City’s visitors had to settle for less. The construction boom of single-family homes during the 1950s and ’60s gave America’s middle class a degree of comfort and privacy in their home life that their grandparents never dreamt possible. The vacationer’s standards had changed, but the resort’s had not. The modern world vacationer refused to share a bathroom with someone else, sleep in a small room without air conditioning, or walk two blocks to park his car when he didn’t have to at home. Atlantic City’s reputation could still lure first-time visitors, but few of them returned.

The decline in repeat business meant a rise in vacancies, and empty hotel rooms couldn’t make money for their owners. To generate income many of the hotels and boardinghouses were converted into either nursing homes for the aged or shelter care facilities for the poor and transient. Atlantic City has always had a shortage of permanent housing, especially for its poor. These boarders couldn’t pay the same rates vacationers had, but they made for year-round occupancy. With the presence of long-term, low-rent tenants, maintenance of the smaller hotels and boardinghouses all but ceased. What had once been gay and colorful places were now shabby and broken-down. The old buildings were as sad-looking as their new tenants.

The deterioration wasn’t limited to the physical structures of the city. Atlantic City’s population base was eroding. More and more Whites were abandoning their town. The out-migration of the city’s White population was significant, nearly doubling every 10 years. Between the years 1940 and 1970, the percentage of Whites declined from nearly 80 percent to 50 percent. During the same time, total population dropped from 64,094 to 47,859. The decade of the ’60s was devastating with the resort losing a full one-third of its White population. The exodus of Whites, most whom left their businesses and took their money with them, meant that unskilled workers in the tourist economy, particularly Blacks, had to fend for themselves.

The economic well-being of the African-American community had always been tenuous. They were the muscle and sweat needed to run the hotel and recreation industry, and their financial status rose and fell with the prosperity of the tourist trade. When jobs grew scarce, Blacks discovered they had competition from White workers. Hotel employment was no longer exclusively “Negro work.” As the resort’s fortunes declined, Blacks found themselves trapped in a city that had no use for them. The grandchildren of the Black workers who had played such a crucial role in transforming Atlantic City from a beach village to a national resort were now a burden and an object of scorn. This disdain was a cruel irony for people whose families had been a major building block in developing the town.

Along with the change in its racial makeup, Atlantic City’s population was becoming increasingly elderly, with nearly a third of its population over 65. During the ’60s the resort became second only to the Tampa-St. Petersburg region of Florida as the area having the highest percentage of senior citizens. While older persons were moving into Atlantic City, younger persons, the wage earners, were moving out. Many of the senior citizens attracted to the resort were former weekend visitors who recalled the glory days of Atlantic City during their youth. They came in search of a retirement of happy weekends seven days a week. Rather than years of bliss, strolling the Boardwalk and enjoying the sea breezes, they found urban decay with its squalor and violence. Some became prisoners in their own homes. The city’s housing stock, of which two-thirds was constructed prior to 1940, was becoming physically obsolete and unsafe. For many of the newly arrived seniors, their dream of an idyllic retirement soon became a nightmare.