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

While the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority has funded important housing and commercial projects re-invigorating sections of the city, only one development—The Walk/Atlantic City Outlets—has been a game changer. In many parts of town the deterioration that started in the 1960s continues undeterred. There has yet to materialize a sustained effort to rebuild the entire city into a clean, safe, first-rate resort. For the past thirty-plus years, it’s been a hit-or-miss, piecemeal effort.

Numerous buildings that had fallen into disuse pre-casino gambling still haven’t found a purpose, and no one seems to know whether to permit them to continue standing or demolish them and create yet another empty lot. A threshold question to begin valuing any city’s real estate is to ask, “If the building occupying a site were to burn down, would the owner rebuild?” By that standard, large portions of Atlantic City have a meager value. A recent editorial in The Press of Atlantic City , commenting on real estate eyesores, suggested to local readers, “Drive through the city with a fresh set of eyes, see it for the first time as visitors do, and these buildings cast a bleak and ugly pall over the city trying to market itself as a glitzy, vibrant, always turned on resort.”

Two knowledgeable observers whose profession is to investigate and report on events in Atlantic City cast their cold eye in this direction to help assess where the resort stands today. If newspapers are the “first draft of history,” then investigative reporters Donald Wittkowski and Michael Clark are first-rate historians of the casino and political worlds that dominate today’s Atlantic City. Wittkowski spends his days scrutinizing every aspect of the casino industry. Clark’s beat is City Hall, and he probes for answers to the puzzle of local government.

Wittkowski finds no virtue in subtlety. “Atlantic City blew it. It enjoyed a monopoly as the only casino city east of the Mississippi for 14 years, yet squandered that time by failing to develop the jaw-dropping, Vegas-like attractions that would ensure gambling customers would keep coming back for more. Only one new casino was built from 1990 to 2003, an astonishingly long lull. Profits rolled in like waves from the ocean, so casino operators felt no pressure or need then to invest in rebuilding the city.”

With profits down, Wittkowski fears that more properties may go the way of the Sands. “Atlantic City gaming revenue has plummeted 25 percent, from a peak of $5.2 billion in 2006 to $3.9 billion in 2009. No one knows when it will finally hit bottom. Inevitably, there will be a shake-up. Vanishing profits, competition, and a still-fragile economy will force weak casinos to close.” Wittkowski believes a turnaround is possible but it will take many years and require committed leadership from both the casino-hotel industry and City Hall.

Clark’s take on City Hall is every bit as unsettling. “City Hall has been a place where potential goes to die. Whether newly elected officials with promises of change or a project to revitalize a neighborhood, the promises broken here reverberate throughout the city. And in all the discussions about combating the city’s challenges from growing gambling competition, local government’s problems are no longer part of the conversation. They’re accepted as an unavoidable fact, the That’s-City-Hall-for-you excuse.”

As Clark notes, “City Hall’s failings have a major affect on Atlantic City’s hopes to be a premier resort. The city has one of the highest ratios of employees to population in the country—a direct product of the endless cronyism that has dominated City Hall since the early 20th century. The mantra continues like a drum beat, ‘How do I get my piece?’ With so much money tied up in salaries, there’s little left for infrastructure, which continues to slip into disrepair.”

Wittkowski’s and Clark’s assessments may be grim but they aren’t surprising.

From this observer’s perspective, the challenges facing the resort are just history playing out. Atlantic City remains an experiment in social planning. Today, as was true when Jonathan Pitney founded his resort more than 160 years ago, the only reason for the town’s existence is to provide leisure-time activities for visitors. Today as then, repeat business by vacationers and conventioneers is critical, but the heady days of the 1990s when the casino industry was like a money factory are gone. One needs look no further than the empty Pinnacle site—19 acres sitting idle—to see that things have changed.

Also true today, as it was in the era of Nucky Johnson, is that this city has yet to embrace the customs and practices of most local governments for the exercise and transfer of power. Nucky’s legacy of machine politics has been replaced by an endless free-for-all among politicians hoping to be the next boss, who use the city’s payroll to swell the ranks of their supporters. Despite its corruption, the “Boardwalk Empire” of the Kuehnle/Johnson/Farley machine delivered essential municipal services in a competent manner. That can’t be said today.

Complacency is fatal for a town like Atlantic City. Keeping the experiment prospering and re-imagining an empire (this time a partnership of community leaders and casino-hotel interests) requires each generation of leaders to develop a vision for accomplishing the town’s singular mission.

All the pieces for a “renaissance” are here: the mighty Atlantic Ocean, beautiful beaches, the world famous Boardwalk, easy access by more than one-fourth of the nation’s population, a modern convention center, a first-rate entertainment venue in Boardwalk Hall (part of Nucky’s complex legacy), institutions of higher learning eager to share their knowledge, the building trades required to finish reconstructing the town, and most important, a skilled hotel workforce capable of making a hotel-resort economy operate with grace and efficiency. The only pieces missing from a formula for success is enlightened leadership and a sense of urgency, the likes of which propelled the adoption of the 1976 gambling referendum. When those two pieces emerge, Atlantic City will be on its way to once again becoming a premier resort destination.

SOURCE NOTES

To avoid cumbersome footnotes interspersed throughout the text and still provide the reader with my sources, I have utilized the practice of reference to particular passages by page number, here at the end, rather than with breaks in my narrative. Hopefully, it will be easier on the reader’s eye. These Source Notes list the personal interviews, newspapers, magazines, books, public records, studies, journal articles, and treatises that were the most influential in shaping my perspective on Atlantic City’s history.

Due to personal and professional commitments, my research spanned two decades. Within a short time of beginning my interviews I quickly realized that I was in a race against death. So many of the key players were along in years that I feared I might never get to the most knowledgeable persons. I was fortunate to speak with as many as I did. More often than not, repeat visits were necessary. Sometimes these additional visits were to confirm what other persons had said, other times to test the accuracy of my perspectives as they evolved. Interestingly, some key people opened up to me only after several visits. The more some people knew of what I had learned, the more willing they were to talk to me. A few, like Dick Jackson and Murray Fredericks, initially spent most of the time asking questions and didn’t answer many of mine. They were testing me. As Dick Jackson said at the beginning of our third meeting, “Now that I know you’ve done your homework and are serious about this, we can talk.”