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Atlantic City Gamble: A fine idea on paper

Category: Atlantic City by Rail

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Written by Randy Garbin

Every Father's Day, I like to take my daughter on a train ride. This year I had the bright idea to go to Atlantic City.

Nobody loves the beach more than Roadside Girl.

A happy summer in the Delaware Valley means spending as little time here as possible. Folks in this region consider a summer not spent at least partially on the beach as a summer completely wasted. For teenagers, a shore trip represents a right-of-passage. For families, it means a breezy respite from whatever grind left behind. For little kids, the lights, sounds, and smells of the boardwalk fill out a volume of happy memories to pass along to future generations.

Though I consider myself more of hills-and-lakes guy, I know what these trips mean to both my wife and daughter, so I happily cooperate with any plans that take us out there. Every year since moving here, we've visited and revisited some of New Jersey's most popular beach resort destinations, including Ocean City, Long Beach Island, and of course, the Doo-Wop paradise of Wildwood.

Every year, however, I look down at the map, and it reminds me that New Jersey Transit runs a train out to Atlantic City from Philadelphia. Blessed by the fact that we live so close to a train station along this interconnected system, I toyed with the notion that we might give that a try for once. No cars. No traffic. No worries about parking. And I get to finally revisit the fabled Jersey resort city that I first saw back in the late 1960s.

Even on what could be considered a perfect beach day, Atlantic City has trouble attracting visitors to its shoreline.

 As most of us know, Atlantic City's hey-day came and went decades ago. Home to the diving horse, the Steel Pier, and the pulchritudinous Miss America Pageant, the city did its own nose dive after the construction of the Interstate Highway System and advent of the airline industry. Resorts such as Miami Beach and Las Vegas took siphoned all the glamour (as well as much of the organized crime) and the more family friendly local attractions such as Ocean City and Wildwood grabbed the station wagon crowd.

You can easily find a hint of what built Atlantic City by looking at the four middle "properties" on the Monopoly board: the Pennsylvania, Reading, B & O, and the Jersey Central railroads all served to bring the hoards of vacationers to its famous boardwalk and hotels. As this country's first resort city, Atlantic City sprang up in an unlikely location growing to an unlikely size. With no other industry except for tourism, it became effectively obsolete as a family destination and withered into decrepitude by the early 1970s. Though its beaches remained broad and inviting, most everything that lead to them went into decline. With no other real industry to fall back upon, the city and New Jersey had to think of something to bring it back or it might just have to tear it down and start over.

Passed into law in 1977, legalized gambling came to Atlantic City as a kind of Hail Mary pass for a town so far down on its knees. Boosters of the idea promised a great Atlantic City revival as profits from the casinos and the revenue from all the new visitors would repave the streets with gold and return the town to all is glories.

Yet, forty-three years later, I walk around the place in search of proof of any sustainable progress brought on by this enterprise. To be sure, the city has in many ways recovered, but considering the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into a city with a population of fewer than 50,000 people, it leaves you wondering what they did with all that money. The 1990s did bring a surge of investment to the city with the addition of several new casinos, including the spectacular Vegas-like Borgata, but at the same time, neighboring states got into the act, first with slots and more recently with the full array of table games. Atlantic City's main market, retired day-trippers looking for slots, could now blow their pensions much closer to home. As a result, New Jersey's experiment in urban revival looks has hit a run of some very bad luck.

And it shows.