How to use this Page

Tweet

A new HBO series, Boardwalk Empire, premiered this weekend. Worlds away from what we see on Jersey Shore, it has reignited interest in New Jersey history and culture. Bryant Simon (author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America and Professor of History at Temple University) has been interviewed for the accompanying HBO documentary, and here we ask him some questions about the “dreamlike” place that is AC.

You’ve described yourself as a native of South New Jersey. What drew you to writing the history of Atlantic City?

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in Vineland, Philly was not the place that drew us; it was more Atlantic City. That was where we went for splurge meals, special occasions, amusement parks, parades, and shopping. In fact, that’s where I got my bar mitzvah suit! Years later, my family moved just outside of Atlantic City and I watched, while riding my bike in the morning on the Boardwalk, as gambling woke the place up and irrevocably transformed it. I was transfixed by the city, by people’s nostalgia for it, by its nervous energy, and its aching sadness and painful poverty in the midst of plenty. Really, it had everything I wanted to write about it – it was like a Springsteen song, a place that could be mean and cruel, but a place of romance and possible redemption. How could I resist?

Compared to places like Las Vegas or Coney Island in its heyday, how did/does Atlantic City epitomize the urban playground?

All of these places share something in common – they are each the tale of two cities. They are places built in the interests of visitors, not necessarily residents; they sell (or sold) fantasies – fantasies that put tourists as the center of the narrative and allowed them to slip their daily skin and imagine themselves not as they were, but as they wanted to be. That is what people paid for when they went these places – they paid for fantasies.

As you researched the book, what memorable anecdotes did you come across that really captured the heart and history of Atlantic City?

One of the first things I learned about Atlantic City stayed with me throughout the project. I remember looking at a postcard from the 1920s or so. In it, the benches on the Boardwalk were pointed away from the beach. I asked if this was a mistake. “No” an expert on the city told me, “That’s how it was.” That was my first lesson that Atlantic City was essentially a stage and the visitors were both actors and audience.

You’ve been interviewed for a documentary that’s set to run in conjunction with the HBO series, Boardwalk Empire. What do you make of the series’ take on Atlantic City, and what to your mind does it say about public perception of the city?

If the show is a success, it will no doubt draw tourists to town, looking for the romantic, if still violent, past the program surely mythologizes. Yet the real Atlantic City Boardwalk of today has little relationship to the past except its common geography. Most of the dreamlike hotels – buildings that looked like French chateaux and Moorish palaces – have been torn down. The amusement piers are long gone or covered up and turned into air-conditioned malls. The crowds of people dressed in their Sunday – really their sleek and elegant Saturday night best – have been replaced by people in t-shirts and flip flops. Except for the ocean and

The CNMI House voted to give Rota $500,000 dollars for start-up costs of their casino. Merry Christmas!


But I'm feeling decidedly like Scrooge. $500,000 is a lot of money that could do more good used elsewhere, like at PSS or DPS or CHC.

The large majority of people in Saipan voted against casinos. And the CNMI's overwhelming majority of population is in Saipan.

So if the people of Rota want a casino, which THEY voted for, let them pay for it themselves. Bah Humbug!

by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt 2006

What could be more benign than the moon, cycling through the night sky, orbiting Earth and inspiring song and romance.

Bringing with it the end of life as we know it.

Miranda's journal entries quickly bring us up to speed. Her parents are separated, her father's remarried and his new young wife is newly pregnant. Her older brother is finishing up his first year at college and her younger brother thinks of nothing but baseball. Among Miranda's close friends she counts a girl enamored with her Born Again minister. Another friend died in an accident last year. Due to an injury Miranda has had to give up ice skating for swimming but she still follows the rise of a local boy on his way toward the Olympics.

Then there's all this talk -- excited talk -- about an asteroid on a collision course with the moon. The scientists have made their calculations and deemed the event historic but safe. The face of the moon has shown a history of asteroid damage and this current event promises to be spectacular, viewable with binoculars if not with the naked eye.

Miscalculation. The density of the asteroid was greater than anticipated. The moon is knocked from its orbit, closer to the Earth. Tides erupt into tsunamis all over the world. Earthquakes. Volcanoes awaken. The shoreline of every continent is swallowed. News vanishes from coastal radio and television networks. The moon sits uncomfortably close to the horizon.

Panic sets in. Miranda's mom has preservation instincts enough to grab as much cash as she can and go shopping for perishables. Miranda, her younger brother Jonny and their close family friend Mrs. Nesbit all help stockpile goods for the pantry. Miranda feels it's all a bit much, but then everyone is doing it so maybe her mom knows what she's doing. Families start to leave town, kids stop going to school. News comes in spurts from landlocked cities: rolls of the dead are read. The electricity begins to falter. The sky is covered in volcanic ash, the temperature rises, then falls sharply. How long with the heating oil and gas last? What kind of a winter is coming?

How long will Miranda and her family last?

As a member of Gen X (or the tail end of the Boomers, depending on where you set your marker) I'm one of those who have never had to learn first hand what bad times could be like. We've suffered depressions, but not like in the 20's and 30's. We've seen wars, and war protests, but it never really challenged our daily lives the way World War II brought on rationing and home front sacrifice. The Holocaust is something in history books, not living memory. I've seen my fair share of earthquakes (1971 and 1989), watched the hurricanes and tornadoes on the news, read about famine and disaster the world over. But the members of The Greatest Generation have done their job a little too well by cocooning the rest of us from the realities they vowed never to suffer again. We have not, as sheltered Americans, as world citizens en masse, had the personal experience of knowing what we would do when pressed to our limits.

Which is why some of us like reading about Earth shattering events that provoke those corners of our brains to ask "What would I do in that situation?" I couldn't make a steady diet of books and movies like that, like Life As We Knew It, but I could consume my fair share. I think many teens do, and for similar reasons -- because we want to compare our own emotions and reactions with those of the characters. We want to be right, and where we're wrong we want to know how and why. The book, movie or play become personal, we judge the characters and evaluate the situations and run a parallel narrative in our heads. Yes, hoard as much as you can, share with no one, and think about what you do when people get desperate. Can you second guess the medical concerns, the biological variables, the emotional trauma? When the food runs scarce who eats less, who eats more and who gives up all together?

I think Pfeffer has put together a great little story here, one that opens itself naturally to questions of morals and values. That alone probably prohibits it from use in the classroom (because morals and values aren't measured on standardized tests) but it shouldn't prevent whole-hearted recommendations to teens. I have a few questions and items I wish were addressed in the book -- political information, how the governments survived and some of the social mechanics of community, particularly after the first winter -- but perhaps that means I can look forward to a sequel. Honestly, there probably isn't any way to include the political in a journal reporting on a closed system like a single family's survival, still one can always hope.

Hope. Yeah, that's in there as well. The hope that Miranda can one day go to the prom, that the worst is over and that, with some adjustment, life as she once knew it will one day return.

Whilst listening to the audiobook of Life As We Knew It, Jen Robinson recently speculated aloud as to why it is that post-apocalyptic children's books are so doggone compelling. I see eye-to-eye with Jen on this one. I went through an interesting let's-read-all-the-post-apocalypse kidlit-we-can-get-our-hands-on phase three years ago. I was wolfing down Z for Zachariah, Eva (oh, it totally counts), Tomorrow When the War Began, Hole In the Sky, Noah's Castle (oh yeah, I got obscure), and more. Couldn't get enough.

Now it looks as if there is an answer to Jen's question in the L.A. Times piece, Boom times for the end of the world. Apparently 9/11 and fear mongering play a hand in the current upsurge. I recently met with the delightful Sue Stauffacher, and Sue happened to mention that her beautiful book Donuthead (one of those omigodyouhaven'treadthisyet? titles) was inspired in some small part by the fear surrounding the attack on the World Trade towers. How better to address such a concern than with a character afraid of absolutely everything? And if it comes down to deciding between a child named Franklin Delano Donuthead and a book where everyone's either died of a dread disease or been turned into bald deaf zombies, I know which one I'll pick.

Thanks to Bookninja for the link.