The City That Keeps Reinventing Itself

There is a quality to Atlantic City that no other American city quite reproduces. It is the quality of a place that has always been a projection, an image of what its visitors wanted or needed it to be. In the eighteen fifties it was a health resort, a place where city workers breathed ocean air and recovered.

In the eighteen eighties it was a pleasure beach, gaudy and democratizing, accessible to factory workers who could afford a train ticket. In the nineteen twenties it was a wide-open town, the place where Prohibition didn't apply and the political boss served the best illegal bourbon on the eastern seaboard. In the nineteen forties and fifties it was a convention city, a showbiz destination, a place where the Miss America pageant played to national television cameras and where Club Harlem on Kentucky Avenue was running one of the best variety shows in the country.

Then it emptied out. Then it was reborn as a casino city, the eastern Nevada, drawing buses from Philadelphia and New York and Baltimore. Then some of those casinos closed, and the question of what came next was asked again.

The Boardwalk is still here, more than four miles of it in Atlantic City alone, the oldest in the world, planked and steady. The lighthouse still shines at the north end of the island. The Lenape called it Absegami, the little water, and the bay to the west still fills and empties with each tide the way it always has.

The ocean is unchanged. The city built alongside it has never stopped negotiating with itself about what it is supposed to be.