From fantasyland to wasteland, Atlantic City has been there.
And, according to guest lecturer Bryant Simon, the current state of the city isn't much to brag about, except maybe its 1996 Money Magazine ranking as the worst place to live in the United States.
On Tuesday afternoon, about 25 people gathered to hear Simon, a University of Georgia history professor, speak about the seemingly perpetually downtrodden city that lies some 50 miles east of Philadelphia.
"Atlantic City is like America on steroids," Simon said. "Its features are bloated and exaggerated."
He described how once a "sun and fun" destination for the middle class, the city's decline began in the 1940s and 1950s. The Civil Rights era and the end of segregation brought a massive wave of "white flight," and the disappearance of the middle-class vacation dollars that sustained the local economy.
The city's famed boardwalk and its luxurious beachfront hotels, built to give "middle-class people a way to show off what they'd earned in America," according to Simon, became a hangout for new immigrant groups and the lower class.
"Longtime visitors hopped on planes to newer and cleaner resorts like Bermuda and Disneyland. Once they couldn't recreate the fantasy of wealth to the middle class, the people stayed away," Simon said.
Desegregated restaurants, hotels and movie theaters closed in droves, having lost their exclusivity, and thus, their appeal.
The solution, in the minds of the city's leaders, was to bring in a new form of entertainment, and in 1976, gambling was legalized within the city's limits.
Yet since the first casino, Resorts International, arrived in 1978, Atlantic City has lost at least one-third of its population, countless businesses have closed and much of the original downtown has been bulldozed.
Though the boardwalk is still there, Simon described it as littered with pizza parlors and dollar stores, now simply "a conveyor belt between casinos."
And although 12 casinos dot the downtown landscape, they do little for the beleaguered city, according to Simon.
"The casinos won't let patrons engage with Atlantic City as a place," he said.
Instead, the casinos build bridges and covered walkways so people won't pass through landscaped city streets or parks, and orient their hotels away from the beach or other public spaces.
And, as Simon noted, perhaps the best illustration of the economic struggles in today's Atlantic City are the lack of normal city amenities.
"There wasn't even a supermarket in the city until two years ago, and there still isn't a single movie theater."
Those who attended the presentation found his perspective illuminating.
"It is a little shocking and a little inspiring to rethink the casinos and the boardwalk the way he described them," history Ph.D. candidate Greg Downs said. "It's such a smart vision, it makes me wonder if I saw it wrong."
