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.

In 1854, a group of engineers and railroad businessmen drew a straight line from Philadelphia to the New Jersey coast, built a railroad along the line, and created Atlantic City. From the 1850s to the 1950s, the city attracted the creme of American society and the working class alike and gave birth to the beauty pageant, rolling chair, boardwalk, saltwater taffy, jitney, and the successful Monopoly board game. But the onset of air travel in the 1950s and the aging grand hotels brought Atlantic City to its knees. The opening of Resorts International in 1978 and the prosperous gaming business that followed in its wake helped the city rise from its own ashes, and a year-round tourism industry exploded. Garish and opulent casino hotels replaced many of the boardwalk dowagers, and new palaces transformed the once desolate marina section into a vibrant destination.

During the early years of Atlantic City (AC) boxing, the fight game was bustling. An array of ring talent, from club fighters to champions, came to the shore to compete at thriving venues like the Northside's Waltz Dream Arena and Convention Hall on the boardwalk. Although ring action was plentiful, the biggest fights were still happening elsewhere, and boxing was just one of many entertainment options in AC. However, everything changed once gambling came to town. As casinos popped up along the boardwalk, Atlantic City fights got bigger and bigger. By the late 1970s, boxing was on the rise, and within a few years, business was booming. Heavyweight champion Mike Tyson ushered in the city's peak era in the late 1980s, a time when more than just fight fans turned their attention to Atlantic City for some of the biggest sporting events ever. Although AC never again topped the impact of those days, boxing action at the shore remained vital for decades to come.

Turiya S.A. Raheem (nee, Lillian D. Thomas) tells her family and community¡¦s history with love, warmth and humor. Concerning that history, she says, ¡§Our story HAD to be told. We built Atlantic City.¡ ̈ Two other African-Americans, Foster and Goddard, based their doctoral dissertations on the Northside¡¦s history, but no one has recounted it the way Mrs. Raheem does in Growing Up in the Other Atlantic City: Wash¡¦s and the Northside. Synopsis for Growing Up in the Other Atlantic City: Wash¡¦s and the Northside By Turiya S.A. Raheem ƒæ Revisit the lives of the people who were part of the Northside community on a decade-by-decade journey with the Washington family, owners of Wash and Sons¡¦ Seafood Restaurant (1937 to present) ƒæ Enter the family business through the eyes of Lillian, one of the grandchildren of Alma and Clifton Washington, as she works in the business as a teenager ƒæ Meet Alma and Clifton, newly-weds and newcomers to Atlantic City in the 1920¡¦s ƒæ Laugh with the Washington¡¦s five sons, two daughters and other family members who worked at the restaurant ƒæ Experience the socio-economic, political, religious and educational life of Blacks in Atlantic City through the trials and tribulations of the Washington family during the Great Depression, World War II, the prosperous 50¡¦s and the turbulent 60¡¦s ƒæ Sympathize with the demise of ¡§the World¡¦s Playground¡ ̈ and the exodus of African-Americans and Wash¡¦s during the 70¡¦s ƒæ Celebrate the Washington family¡¦s perseverance and survival as one of A.C.¡¦s few Black family-owned and ¡Voperated businesses still in existence after more than 70 years

Through most of the 20th century, Atlantic City, New Jersey, was controlled by a powerful partnership of local politicians and racketeers. Funded by payoffs from gambling rooms, bars and brothels, this corrupt alliance reached full bloom during the reign of Enoch 'Nucky' Johnson - the second of the three bosses to head the Republican machine that dominated city politics and society. In Boardwalk Empire, Nucky Johnson, Louis 'the Commodore' Kuehnle, Frank 'Hap' Farley, and Atlantic City itself spring to life in all their garish splendour. Author Nelson Johnson traces 'AC' from its birth as a quiet seaside health resort, through the corruption, notorious backroom politics and power struggles, to the city's rebirth as an international entertainment and gambling mecca where anything goes. Boardwalk Empire is the true story that inspired the epic HBO series starring Steve Buscemi, Michael Pitt and Kelly Macdonald. 'As good, if not better, than the television series' Independent

For much of the 20th century the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, NJ, was the center of American entertainment on the East Coast. There were big bands, movies, sideshows, acrobats, flag-pole sitters, Frank Sinatra, Miss America ¿ and throngs of people lining up to get a seat so they could watch brave horses and riders dive into a pool of water. It was aptly called the ¿Showplace of the Nation¿ and it was all that and more. This all-in-one entertainment mecca has never been matched. Where else could you take the entire family for a day and see fortune-telling parakeets, the World of Tomorrow, John Philip Sousa and his band, a bear on a bicycle, World Famous Diving Horses, take a ride below the sea in the Diving Bell, spend the evening in the marine ballroom, and take in a movie ¿ all for one ticket? It was a colossal offering of escape, popular culture, fun and fantasy. Today the golden age of the Pier seems a world apart. Yet it was an institution ¿ a destination not to be missed ¿ an empire of grand-thinking impresarios, oddities and glamour that meshed into one attainable summer destination. Steel Pier evokes a time when more really was more, a time when there was so much invention, talent and industry that it could only be experienced in one place ¿at the edge of the continent, in a city that took its name from a vast ocean, on a great pier reaching out into the sea.