Boardwalk of Dreams

Abstract

During the first half of the 20th century, Atlantic City was the nation's most popular middle-class resort — the home of the famed Boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant, and the board game Monopoly. By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, the city doesn't have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress. This book uses the case of Atlantic City to discuss the boundaries of public space in urban America. It argues that in the past public space was not about democracy but about exclusion. During Atlantic City's heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city's public spaces more open and democratic and many middle-class Americans fled to suburban-style resorts such as Disneyworld. With the opening of the city's first casino in 1978, the urban balance once again shifted and tourists were deliberately kept away from the city's grim reality and its predominantly poor African American residents. The narrative of this book points to the troubling fate of urban America, and the observations and conclusions of this book to implications for those interested in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, and history.