The Gamble That Built a City Again
Near Atlantic City, New Jersey
By the nineteen sixties and seventies, Atlantic City was in serious trouble. The resort that had drawn millions by rail from Philadelphia and New York had never adapted well to the automobile. Highway access was poor.
The hotels were aging. Competing beach resorts with better infrastructure had taken the family vacation market. The Boardwalk still drew visitors, but the city behind it had hollowed out.
Poverty and disinvestment spread through neighborhoods that had once been thriving. The answer the city and the state eventually reached for was gambling. In nineteen seventy-four, New Jersey voters defeated a statewide casino referendum.
Two years later, a narrower proposal, casinos only in Atlantic City, framed explicitly as a tool of urban redevelopment, passed with fifty-six percent of the vote. Resorts International opened on May twenty-sixth, nineteen seventy-eight, at the old Chalfonte-Haddon Hall hotel on the Boardwalk. It was the first legal casino in the United States outside Nevada.
People lined up for hours along the Boardwalk to get inside. Within months, Resorts International was the highest-grossing casino in the world. More casinos followed through the nineteen eighties.
The boom was real: by two thousand and six, Atlantic City casinos were generating five point two billion dollars in annual revenue. Then the edge eroded. Pennsylvania legalized casinos in two thousand and four.
New York, Maryland, and other surrounding states followed. Atlantic City's regional monopoly was gone. Revenue fell by nearly half over the next decade.
Several casinos closed. The city that had been rebuilt by gambling found itself threatened by it again, not by moral opposition this time, but by competition. The story is not over.
It never quite is, here.
