In September 2014, a two-year-old building on the Atlantic City boardwalk went dark. Revel had cost $2. 4 billion to build, and the state of New Jersey had backed it with $261 million in tax credits because the men who approved that money believed the tower would save the city. It opened in April 2012 and closed after just 29 months.
It later sold for $82 million, roughly three cents on the dollar. Few people say out loud that Revel was only the third rescue attempt for Atlantic City. Thirty-six years before Revel went dark, New Jersey had done something for this city that it has never done for Newark, Camden, or Trenton. It amended its own constitution for one town, not for a highway or a school system, but for a strip of sand at the far end of an expressway.
The law that followed stated plainly what the gambling was for. The legislature wrote that casino gaming had been approved by the citizens of New Jersey as a unique tool of urban redevelopment, not entertainment. That one word, redevelopment, is the whole story. The promise was enormous.
Casinos would clear the slums, put the unemployed back to work, and fill the hotels that had been rotting since the Kennedy administration. In 2006 alone, the casinos won $5. 2 billion from their customers. Yet Atlantic City’s poverty rate today runs above 30 percent, roughly four times the rest of the state.
The money came in a torrent. It simply never crossed the boardwalk. Atlantic City was never a town that grew. It was a product, and it had a designer.
In the 1840s, a country doctor named Jonathan Pitney rode a horse around Absecon Island, a strip of marsh and dune grass with a handful of fishing families and no bridge to the mainland, telling anyone who would listen that the sea air cured consumption. Nobody cared. What Pitney needed was a railroad. He found a civil engineer named Richard Osborne, who sat down and drew the street plan of a city that did not exist.
The two of them carried those drawings to Philadelphia money. The Camden and Atlantic Railroad ran its first train on July 4, 1854, sixty miles from Camden to the sand. The city was incorporated that same year. The train changed who the beach belonged to.
Before 1854, the seaside was a fortnight for people who kept a carriage. After 1854, a Philadelphia clerk could leave after breakfast and stand in the surf before the afternoon was out. By the mid-1870s, crowds reportedly reached half a million a year. They were bricklayers, shopgirls, Irish barmen, German butchers.
The new thing was not the ocean. It was that an entire town had been engineered around their wages. In the spring of 1870, a train conductor named Alexander Boardman and a hotelier named Jacob Kim carried a complaint to the city council with a fix. Lay a wooden walkway over the beach so people would scrape their shoes on planks instead of carpet.
It cost $5,000, roughly half of everything Atlantic City collected in taxes that year. It opened on June 26, 1870, eight feet wide and a mile long. Nobody at that council meeting understood what they had just authorized. The boardwalk was a piece of janitorial equipment.
Within twenty years, it was among the most valuable retail frontage in the United States, and every serious building in Atlantic City had turned around to face it. The city quietly reorganized itself into two halves. The side facing the water where the money was, and the side facing the town where the people were. That division has never once been broken.
By 1898, the piers were an arms race. The Steel Pier opened that June, advertising itself as the showplace of the nation. One admission bought the whole day: vaudeville, a band, a motion picture, a circus act. From 1928, a horse climbed a ramp forty feet above the water and jumped with a girl on its back into a tank.
Annie Oakley shot on the pier’s opening bill. The hotels went the same way, bigger and stranger. The Marlborough-Blenheim rose beside the boardwalk in 1906, cast in reinforced concrete by Thomas Edison’s own cement company. The Traymore grew to six hundred rooms.
These were among the largest resort hotels on Earth, standing on a barrier island that fifty years before had been a mosquito swamp. Still, the season was too short. Everything the city had built emptied out on Labor Day. In September 1921, hotel men and local businessmen staged what they first called an intercity beauty contest on the Million Dollar Pier for the openly stated purpose of holding visitors in town one extra week.
The winner was a sixteen-year-old from Washington named Margaret Gorman. Within two years, the newspapers were calling her Miss America. The most enduring institution Atlantic City ever produced had been invented as a hotel occupancy scheme. The work of making those beds was done by black families who had come north for it, thousands of them.
The city that sold itself as the world’s playground would not let them swim in front of the hotels they cleaned. They were pushed onto one stretch of sand at Missouri Avenue, called Chicken Bone Beach, and inland into the North Side. So the North Side built its own version of everything. Kentucky Avenue held Club Harlem, opened in 1935 with seven bars, two lounges, and a showroom seating more than nine hundred.
Sammy Davis Jr. played there, so did Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Dinah Washington, and a young Aretha Franklin. For forty years, the most exciting three blocks in Atlantic City were the ones the guidebooks did not print. None of it would have existed without the one product Atlantic City sold that no other American resort could match.
It sold permission. Whatever was illegal where you lived was available here all night, and the police walked past it. The town did not tolerate vice. It organized it, priced it, and took a percentage.
For almost sixty years, one office decided who was allowed to operate. The man who ran that office longest was Enoch Johnson, called Nucky by everyone, sheriff’s son, county treasurer, Republican county chairman from 1913, never once mayor of anything. He wore a red carnation every day and kept a suite at the Ritz-Carlton on the boardwalk. He made no secret of the arrangement.
“We have whiskey, wine, women, song, and slot machines,” he said in a line that has followed him for a century. “If the majority of the people didn’t want them, they wouldn’t be profitable and they wouldn’t exist. ”
Johnson did not license vice. What he sold was protection, a private, deniable cash arrangement in which an operator paid a percentage and the law stayed away.
Nothing was written down. Nothing was taxed. Not one dollar ever reached a municipal budget, a school, or a sewer line. The town got jobs, and the machine got the money.
Prohibition made him a national figure. In May 1929, according to surviving accounts, Johnson hosted a conference of the men who ran the rackets in half a dozen cities. Capone up from Chicago, Torrio, Luciano, Lansky, Costello. Historians still argue over who was actually in the room.
Nobody argues about whose town it was. Every version of the story told about Atlantic City goes slightly wrong at this point, and the correction matters. Nevada legalized casino gambling in March 1931. Atlantic City did not legalize anything until 1976, forty-five years later.
It was never the first place in America where gambling was lawful. It was something stranger. It invented the shape of the business: a big hotel, a showroom with a national headliner, a restaurant, a bar, and a casino running quietly behind a door. Las Vegas did not invent that package.
Las Vegas industrialized it. On July 24, 1946, at the 500 Club, two men named Paul “Skinny” D’Amato put a singer named Dean Martin and a twenty-year-old comic named Jerry Lewis on the same bill and told them after the first show that if the second was no better, they were both fired. They threw the act out and improvised. The most successful comedy team in American history was assembled that night to save a nightclub booking.
Five years later, Skinny D’Amato did it again. Frank Sinatra had lost his record contract, his film contract, and his voice, and in 1951 the 500 Club gave him an extended run when almost nobody else would book him. The men who later built the Sands and the Copa Room in Las Vegas watched how Atlantic City did it and then did it in the desert with better weather, no season, and a state government that had already made the backroom legal. The federal government finished Nucky Johnson the way it finished Capone, not with gambling or liquor, but with arithmetic.
He was indicted in May 1939 over roughly $125,000 in unreported income and convicted in July 1941 on eleven counts of tax evasion. He served four years in Lewisburg and returned to Atlantic City, where he lived quietly until 1968. The machine did not die with him. It got a law degree.
Frank Farley, universally called Hap, took the organization over in 1941 and ran it for thirty years from a seat in the New Jersey Senate. Farley’s genius was to move the whole operation from the back room to Trenton. He delivered Atlantic County’s votes and came home with appropriations. The Garden State Parkway interchange, a state college, and eventually the Atlantic City Expressway, which opened in 1965.
But the product was already rotting. Air conditioning arrived in ordinary houses in the 1950s, and a family in Camden no longer had to go anywhere to escape the heat. Commercial jets arrived at the same time. Florida had the same water, better winters, and newer hotels, and it did not shut down in September.
Then police finally closed the back room at the 500 Club in the early 1950s. With the gambling gone, the club was just a nightclub in a town whose season was collapsing. Atlantic City had counted 66,198 residents in 1930. It has not been that big since.
In 1964, the city got what looked like a magnificent rescue. Hap Farley persuaded the Democratic National Committee to hold its presidential convention in Atlantic City, where President Lyndon Johnson would be nominated. It was supposed to be four nights of free national advertising. It was the single worst thing that ever happened to the town.
Delegates found wallpaper peeling in corridors, rooms without air conditioning in August, fixtures from the 1920s that had never been replaced. And the visitors complaining were several thousand journalists. Theodore White wrote the sentence that sank it. Of Atlantic City, he said, “Time has overtaken it, and it has become one of those sad gray places.
” Thirty years of careful advertising were undone in a fortnight. Something else happened in that hall. Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party sat before the credentials committee and described being beaten in a Winona jail for trying to register to vote. Two miles away on Kentucky Avenue, Club Harlem was playing to a full house.
After 1964, the bookings went. The great hotels started coming down. The Traymore was imploded in April 1972. The 500 Club burned in June 1973.
Urban renewal did to the North Side what it did everywhere else. Blocks came down on the promise of new housing that mostly did not get built, and what replaced them in many cases was grass, gravel, and chain link. By 1975, roughly a third of Atlantic City’s population was on some form of public assistance, and unemployment ran at more than double the state rate. The first attempt at a casino rescue failed, and the way it failed taught everyone the lesson that mattered.
On November 5, 1974, New Jersey voters were asked to amend the state constitution to permit casino gambling with individual towns deciding for themselves. It lost in nineteen of the state’s twenty-one counties. A voter in Bergen County was not voting about Atlantic City. He was voting about a casino two miles from his own children’s school.
So its backers made it smaller, and that was the most consequential edit in the history of the city. Two changes. Casinos would be permitted in one municipality only, named in the Constitution: Atlantic City. And the state’s cut would be earmarked permanently by law before anyone was asked to approve it.
The tax on casino winnings would flow into a dedicated fund that would pay for reductions in property taxes, rents, telephone, gas, electric, and utility charges for eligible senior citizens and disabled residents of the entire state, all twenty-one counties. The gambling was placed in one poor city and the proceeds were promised to elderly voters everywhere else, which is precisely why it passed. On November 2, 1976, New Jersey said yes. Governor Brendan Byrne signed the Casino Control Act on June 2, 1977.
The law built the strictest gambling regulation in the country. Resorts International opened its doors at ten in the morning on May 26, 1978 in the old Haddon Hall on the boardwalk, with eighty-four table games and 893 slot machines. Governor Byrne cut the ribbon and made a promise. “Organized crime is not welcome in Atlantic City, and I warn them again to keep their filthy hands out of Atlantic City and keep them the hell out of our state.
” It was a fine line. It was also, in a way nobody noticed, an answer to the wrong question. The thing that had hollowed out this city was never the mob. It was the absence of a reason for anyone to stay overnight.
For about eight years, the rescue looked like the greatest urban turnaround in modern American history. By 1987, there were twelve casinos on a four-mile island, employing more than forty thousand people in decent union jobs with health coverage. By the late 1980s, the city drew something on the order of thirty million visitors a year, more foot traffic than Las Vegas. And the population of Atlantic City went down.
Forty thousand jobs arrived, billions of dollars in construction went up, and the number of people who actually lived in the city fell. The workers mostly drove in from Egg Harbor, Galloway, Northfield, and Pleasantville, spent nothing in the city, and drove home. A casino is a very large machine for extracting money from a region and depositing it somewhere else. The buildings had no windows on the gaming floor, no clocks.
The restaurants, bars, shops, theater, and cash machines were all inside, and the front door faced the ocean. Then came the buses. Casinos ran their own motor coach programs out of Philadelphia, North Jersey, and New York. Cheap fare, a roll of quarters or a cash voucher on arrival, seven hours on the floor, home by midnight.
Of those thirty million annual visitors, the overwhelming majority never slept in Atlantic City. The profits did not stay either. Steve Wynn had opened the Golden Nugget on the boardwalk in 1980, ran it for seven years, and in 1987 sold it to Bally’s for a reported $440 million. He took that money west.
He put it into the Mirage, which opened in Las Vegas in 1989 with a volcano out front, and reset what a casino was for the next thirty years. Atlantic City did not simply lose to Las Vegas. Atlantic City helped pay for it. In 1984, the legislature built a second machine to fix the first one, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority.
Every casino faced a choice: pay an extra 2. 5 percent of gaming revenue to the state in tax, or reinvest 1. 25 percent through the CRDA into projects in the city. Every one of them chose reinvestment.
But by 2004, two decades in, the CRDA had funded roughly 1,394 housing units, about half its original goal. Over the same stretch, the legislature kept redirecting the authority’s purpose into helping casinos add hotel rooms. The other stream, the one voters were actually promised, has paid out billions through the casino revenue fund since 1978. It was never designed to spend a single dollar inside Atlantic City.
The man who understood the boom best was a thirty-eight-year-old developer from Queens who arrived at the end of it. Donald Trump opened Trump Plaza in May 1984. He got the Castle because New Jersey’s own regulators handed it to him. In February 1985, the Casino Control Commission refused Hilton Hotels a license for its finished marina property, largely over a long relationship with a Chicago labor lawyer, and Trump paid about $325 million for it.
Then he went after the biggest unfinished hole in the city, which became the Taj Mahal. It opened on April 2, 1990, and for a moment it was the largest casino on Earth. Trump had raised $675 million of the near-billion-dollar cost by selling junk bonds that paid 14 percent. That is roughly $94 million a year in interest, about $260,000 every single day, before one dealer was paid.
One man said so in public. Marvin Rothman, a casino analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia, told the Wall Street Journal, “When it opens, Trump will have had so much free publicity, he will break every record in the books in April, June, and July. But once the cold winds blow from October to February, it won’t make it. ” Trump demanded that the firm fire him or have him retract, threatening a major lawsuit.
The firm fired Rothman three days after he correctly described the arithmetic of a building that had not yet opened. The Taj broke records in April exactly as predicted. It also broke down, going dark over the opening weekend because the casino could not count the coins fast enough. By summer, the cash was not there.
The Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy protection in 1991. Still, it worked for a while longer. The Borgata opened in July 2003 and was an immediate hit. In 2006, Atlantic City’s casinos won $5.
2 billion. That was the peak, and it has never been approached since. The reason is embarrassingly simple. The whole business had never been about Atlantic City.
It had been about a monopoly and driving distance. For twenty-eight years, if you lived anywhere between Boston and Richmond and wanted to put money on a blackjack hand legally, there was exactly one place east of the Mississippi you could do it. That was not an achievement of the boardwalk. It was a clause in a state constitution.
And a clause in one state’s constitution cannot stop another state from writing its own. Connecticut went first with Foxwoods in 1992. Delaware put slot machines at its racetracks in 1995. Then in 2004, Pennsylvania legalized slot parlors, and Pennsylvania is the state that actually killed it because Pennsylvania is where the customers came from in the first place.
By 2012, Pennsylvania had passed Atlantic City to become the second largest gambling market in the United States, not because it built anything beautiful, but because a man in Bensalem could lose his money twenty minutes from his house instead of driving an hour down Hap Farley’s expressway. Atlantic City’s land-based casino revenue fell every single year from 2007 to 2016, nine consecutive years. In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy pushed the ocean over the seawall and shut the whole town for days. Watch what happened to one casino.
The Atlantic Club at the foot of the boardwalk, opened in 1980 as Steve Wynn’s Golden Nugget, was sold out of bankruptcy in January 2014 for $23. 4 million to its own competitors, Caesars Entertainment and the Tropicana. Caesars took the building. Tropicana took the slot machines and the customer database.
Then they closed it. A casino was purchased by its competitors for the express purpose of being shut down. Around 1,600 people lost their jobs. That was the context for the second rescue and why it was so enormous.
Revel began in 2007 as a Morgan Stanley project driven by a casino executive named Kevin DeSanctis, who wanted to build a genuine destination resort for people who would come for three days and might not gamble at all. Forty-seven stories of curved glass on the beach. The final number was $2. 4 billion, the most expensive building ever raised in New Jersey.
In April 2010, Morgan Stanley looked at the half-finished tower and walked away, writing off something in the region of $930 million rather than finish it. The steel stood there on the beach, unfinished and rusting, for two years. In February 2011, Governor Chris Christie announced that the state would put up to $261 million in tax incentives behind the project. The argument was familiar to anyone who had been alive in 1976.
This building will save Atlantic City. The tower opened on April 2, 2012, and then it met its market. The market did not recognize it. Revel had no buffet, and the buffet is the single most important room in an Atlantic City casino because it is how you feed four hundred people off a motor coach in forty minutes.
Revel had no bus program at all by choice. Smoking was banned throughout in a business whose most loyal customers smoke. Every one of those decisions was aimed at a customer who comes for three nights and gambles casually. Atlantic City did not have that customer in 2012.
It had a day tripper from Delaware County with a coupon. Revel filed for bankruptcy protection in March 2013, less than a year after opening. On September 2, 2014, the doors closed. The building had operated for 883 days.
In April 2015, a Florida developer named Glenn Straub bought the whole thing for $82 million. There is one piece of luck in that wreck. The state’s $261 million was structured as a rebate against future tax revenue, and the building generated almost none of it, so most of that money was never handed over. Revel was not alone.
In 2014, Atlantic City lost four casinos out of twelve: the Atlantic Club in January, the Showboat on August 31, Revel on September 2, Trump Plaza on September 16. Around eight thousand people lost their jobs inside twelve months. The Showboat was not failing. It was a working casino with customers, closed by its owner, Caesars Entertainment, because Caesars owned three other properties in the same town and wanted the competition out of its own way.
Twenty-one hundred people were put out of work by a building that was doing fine. Then the second thing happened, and it is the part almost nobody outside New Jersey knows because it has no fire and no implosion in it. It is a paperwork event, and it finally broke the city. When a casino’s business collapses, the casino goes to court and argues that its property has been overassessed.
It is entirely legal. In Atlantic City, the casinos were the property. The Borgata alone won more than $170 million in tax appeals against the city, which had already spent that money. The city’s total ratable base stood at about $20.
5 billion in 2010. By 2016, it was $6. 6 billion. The city lost 68 percent of its assessed value in six years, not to a hurricane or a fire, but to successful appeals and closed casinos.
In 1976, the voters of New Jersey amended their constitution to hand Atlantic City an industry, and the central argument was that the industry would become the tax base that rebuilt the city. Forty years later, that industry went into a New Jersey courtroom, proved it was worth far less than assessed, and legally dismantled the tax base it had been installed to provide. No one broke the law. That was the design.
By early 2016, Atlantic City could not reliably make its own payroll, and the state was openly discussing letting a city of 39,000 people go bankrupt for the first time since the Depression. So New Jersey attempted the third rescue, and this one was aimed at the city’s government rather than its beach. The Municipal Stabilization and Recovery Act passed in May 2016, and in November the state exercised it. Trenton took over Atlantic City, taking the power to veto the decisions of the elected council, to hire and fire the city’s employees, to sell its assets, and to break its collective bargaining agreements.
A city that had elected its own government since 1854 stopped in practice governing itself. Not because of corruption. Because the rescue it had been given forty years earlier had finished working. Six days before that takeover began, New Jersey voted on Atlantic City one more time.
On November 8, 2016, Public Question One asked whether casinos should be permitted in two additional counties in the north near New York. It was annihilated, 77 percent to 23 percent. The campaign for expansion spent about $8. 5 million.
The campaign against it, funded by the Atlantic City casinos, spent roughly $11 million. In 1976, a committee spent a little over a million dollars of mostly casino money to buy Atlantic City a monopoly. In 2016, the casinos spent $11 million to stop anyone taking it away. The legislature then did something more permanent.
Under a payment in lieu of taxes arrangement, the casinos no longer pay property tax at all. They pay a negotiated lump sum in the region of $120 million a year shared among the city, the county, and the schools. The largest buildings in Atlantic City are now formally outside the tax roll. They cannot be assessed, so they cannot appeal, so they cannot bankrupt the city again.
The problem was not solved. It was removed from the system that kept failing. The buildings, in the end, outlived all of it. In the last week of June 2018, two casinos opened in Atlantic City on the same day, both of them ghosts.
The Hard Rock opened inside the Trump Taj Mahal after roughly $500 million of work stripped out the minarets and the elephants. Ocean Resort opened inside Revel, where the escalator still climbs past the retail. Two monuments to failed rescues reopened under new signage forty yards apart on the same boardwalk. Trump Plaza got a different ending.
It had stood empty since 2014, shedding debris onto the planks, and on February 17, 2021, 3,800 sticks of dynamite brought thirty-four stories down in 192 seconds while several thousand people watched from the beach. Nine casinos operate there now, and in 2025 they had their best year on the floor since 2012, still, in plain dollars and before any adjustment for inflation, around half of what they won in 2006, while online betting quietly outearns every one of those buildings. The poverty rate in the city they were sent to redevelop remains above 30 percent. The state’s oversight of the local government has been extended past its second deadline.
Miss America, invented in 1921 by hotel men who wanted the rooms full for one extra week, moved out of Atlantic City to Las Vegas in 2006, came home in 2013, and left again in 2019 for Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. The pageant Atlantic City invented to hold its crowds past Labor Day ended up inside one of the casinos that took them. The boardwalk is still there, still doing the job it was built for in 1870. Alexander Boardman and Jacob Kim laid $5,000 of pine over the sand so the beach would stay out of the hotels, and it worked so completely that the town organized itself permanently around the line they drew.
Everything that has ever been built to save Atlantic City, the piers, the pageant, the twelve casinos, the tunnel, the $2. 4 billion of curved glass, has been built on the ocean side of it. The city itself is on the other side. They replace the boards in sections a few hundred feet at a time the way they always have.
And on a windy afternoon, the sand still blows clean across them and settles in the streets behind.