THE BIGGEST MOB HIT IN YEARS

That was the mindset and it never really changed.
Memorial Day to Labor Day with an extra week tacked on for the Miss America Pageant.
You remember the pageant, right?
Oh, yeah, it’s coming back. Great timing. The city’s in the dumps and the pageant, a phony, overhyped,
Boardwalk extravaganza that was designed to extend the season for a week has decided to
bring the girls – young ladies, I mean – back for the “college scholarship” competition. Wink. Wink.
That’ll fix things.
Wait. I have a great idea. Let’s build a pier out off the Boardwalk. Make it an entertainment center.
One admission charge and you can spend all day watching movies, stage shows, maybe some kind of
animal act. I know! A horse that dives into a pool of water. And let’s add a big bell with lots of glass
windows. Kind of a mini-submarine attached to chains. We’ll cram people in and they can stand
claustrophobically next to one another as the bell is lowered into the ocean. It might be hot and
sweaty and muggy in there and you really won’t be able to see anything twenty feet down (not that
there’s that much to see) but it’d be a great gimmick.
All for one price!!
Atlantic City was built as one big carnival act, offering tourists the sizzle but not the steak. The
coming of casino gambling didn’t change that, it just upped the ante, increased the hype. The twelveweek
economy was replaced – in theory at least – by a year-round tourist attraction. But the approach
in the local political and business arenas didn’t change.
“What’s in it for me?” was the first question that was asked. “What’s best for the city?” wasn’t part of
the discussion.
Here’s the bottom line on all this as we try to assess why things are so screwed up— screwed up to the
point, in fact, that there may not be a solution.
You know how New York City is The Big Apple and New Orleans is The Big Easy?
Atlantic City was, and is, The Big Hustle.
Start from that premise and the failure makes sense.
It was never about making it work. It was always about grabbing a piece of the pie. The pie got bigger,
sure, but that just made everyone greedier. So here we sit, marking the 35 th anniversary of the
opening of the first casino and what do we see?
Just up the Boardwalk is Revel, a $2 billion gamble that doesn’t look like it’s going to pay off. The
36 | The Boardwalk Journal | May 2013