Atlantic City's Boardwalk Empire: From Resort to Gambling Mecca

There was a moment, sometime around 1984, when Atlantic City mattered. The moment lasted until 1993. Those nine years constitute the city's entire history as a major American gaming destination.

Before that, Atlantic City was simply the place you went if you could not afford Vegas. A slightly shabby resort town on the Jersey Shore, famous for the Miss America pageant and saltwater taffy, nothing more. The boardwalk had been built in the 1870s and was mostly a destination for people with modest means and modest aspirations.

Then New Jersey legalized gambling. The Casino Control Act passed in 1976. The first casino opened in 1978: Resorts International, a blocky structure that was not built for grandeur but for function. The owners understood that people did not come to Atlantic City for the aesthetic. They came to gamble because it was legal and accessible to the Eastern Seaboard.

0x01The Ascendancy

By 1984, a dozen casinos had opened. Bally's, Caesars, Trump's Casino (opened by the man who would later become famous for other reasons), Sands Atlantic City. Each casino was larger than the last. Each tried to out-glitter the previous one.

The Tropicana opened in 1986 and brought actual glamour. The casino hired showgirls from Vegas. It booked actual entertainers. The Sands, which had opened in 1985, did the same. These casinos understood that a East Coast gambling destination could not compete on elegance with Vegas, so it had to compete on spectacle and access.

Access was the winning formula. A person in Philadelphia could drive two hours to Atlantic City. A person in New York could take a bus. Atlantic City casinos filled with bus tours of people who had never been to Vegas, who might never go to Vegas, and for whom Atlantic City was the full Vegas experience.

The money poured in. The casinos attracted not just tourists but whale players from around the region. The high-limit rooms filled. The restaurants opened. By 1990, Atlantic City was generating more gaming revenue than Las Vegas.

More revenue. Fewer visitors. The implication: Atlantic City's money came from people gambling heavier, for higher stakes, with less emotional distance from their losses than Vegas visitors. Atlantic City was not a vacation. It was a habit.

0x02The Subtraction

The moment Atlantic City mattered ended in 1993. That is when Connecticut legalized gambling. The Mohegan Tribal Nation opened Mohegan Sun. The Mashantucket Pequot opened Foxwoods. Suddenly, people in Boston did not have to drive to Atlantic City. They could drive an hour north. The money started moving.

Then came the slow dissolution. More states legalized gambling. More cities built casinos. Las Vegas remained essential as a destination because of its narrative importance, its size, its brands. Atlantic City had no narrative importance except as the gritty working-class alternative to Vegas.

Once that distinction no longer mattered, Atlantic City had nothing left to offer except familiarity. And familiarity, in gambling, becomes a synonym for decline.

0x03The Boardwalk

The iconic image of Atlantic City is the boardwalk with its casinos. The Boardwalk Empire TV series capitalized on this image: the wooden walkway, the old hotels behind the wooden walkway, the implicit suggestion that there is something transgressive about this particular town.

But the boardwalk was never the draw. The draw was access, convenience, and the social permission to gamble without traveling to Nevada. Once that permission became available in dozens of cities, Atlantic City's structural advantage evaporated.

The Sands demolished itself in 1996 and was replaced with a parking lot. The Tropicana, once the crown jewel, is now a property struggling to compete with newer casinos. Atlantic City's moment lasted exactly as long as it was the closest legal gambling to the Northeast Corridor. Once that changed, the city contracted.

0x04What Remains

Atlantic City still has casinos. Borgata is excellent. Ocean Casino is functional. The Tropicana survives. But they exist in a market where they have to compete not just with each other but with Foxwoods, Mohegan Sun, casinos in Pennsylvania, casinos in upstate New York.

The boardwalk is still there. The wooden planks still connect the casinos. But the mythology is gone. The mythology was always about being the accessible alternative to Vegas. Once that alternative became available everywhere, Atlantic City lost its reason to exist as a destination.

What remains is the city itself. And a city that exists primarily as a gambling destination and has lost that distinction is just a city with old casinos and salt-stained buildings waiting for the next legalization elsewhere to drain more money away.

The moment lasted until 1993. That is long enough to be remembered, not long enough to matter much in the rearview.