The Monopoly Map

Nearly every street name on a Monopoly board comes from a real place in or near Atlantic City. Mediterranean Avenue runs along the western edge of the Boardwalk district. Baltic Avenue cuts through a working-class neighborhood just inland.

Park Place is a short block near the inlet end of the Boardwalk. And the Boardwalk itself, the most expensive property on the board, is this one, the same wooden promenade built in eighteen seventy. The connection goes back to nineteen twenty-nine, when a schoolteacher named Ruth Hoskins moved to Atlantic City from Indianapolis and brought with her a homemade copy of a real-estate game she had learned there.

She made a new board, naming the properties after streets in her new home that had meaning to her and her friends. Her neighbors began playing it. A local realtor named Charles Todd and his wife taught the game to a Germantown, Pennsylvania man named Charles Darrow in the early nineteen thirties.

Darrow manufactured his own version, brought it to Parker Brothers, and sold it in nineteen thirty-five for a sum that made him wealthy. The deeper history is longer and stranger. The original game, called the Landlord's Game, had been invented in nineteen oh-three by a woman named Lizzie Magie, a political activist who designed it to illustrate the theories of economist Henry George about land monopoly and inequality.

The game was meant to demonstrate how landlords extract wealth from tenants. It became, by a long chain of transmission and a great deal of historical forgetting, the best-selling board game in the world, one that celebrates the very dynamic it was designed to critique.