TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/092589/09258900.003

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 24KB | 423 lines

AMERICAN SCENE, Page 64

COVER STORY: Atlantic City, New Jersey

Boardwalk Of Broken Dreams

By Priscilla Painton


    Atlantic City, like Lourdes and Graceland, is a community based
on faith. It is sustained by believers like Anna Zawicki, a street
sultana taking her ease beneath the lavender awning of Bally's Park
Place Casino Hotel, a giant grape Popsicle of a building at the
midpoint of the world's most famous boardwalk. By her right side
is a pair of stuffed raccoons; by her left, an airport luggage cart
that holds her worldly possessions. Frank Sinatra croons to her
from inside a boom box, and she accompanies him from time to time
on a kazoo. "I like it here," she says. "It's better than
Philadelphia, that's for sure. You can't make no money there."

    Zawicki's belief in a cost-free route to fortune is what
Atlantic City, in its newest incarnation, is all about. Shrine of
the shill, hometown of hucksterism, municipal embodiment of the
motto "Ocean, emotion and constant promotion," the city has
reinvented itself time and time again for the sake of a new hustle.
In 1936 its mayor claimed that the Miss America Pageant was a
"cultural event." (True, a contestant in last week's pageant -- the
63rd -- did sing an aria from Die Fledermaus, but the event is
still more about swimwear than opera.) During the Prohibition era,
it was the East Coast Babylon for bootlegging, brothels and
betting, but in 1946 Atlantic City tried to persuade the United
Nations to settle there, citing its "historically noncontroversial
background." In the late '50s the Chamber of Commerce campaigned
to make local newspapers and radio stations refer to cloudy
conditions at the resort as "partly sunny."

    So when times got bad, it was not much of a stretch for this
tired, neglected barker of a town to turn to casino gambling. The
city that once made a paying exhibit out of premature babies and
held a Miss International Nude competition would be doing what it
always did best: separating its visitors from their dollars.

    In 1976 casino promoters bought a television ad that showed
$100 bills falling from the sky, and Atlantic City's voters were
as mesmerized as if they had been tourists on the Boardwalk gawking
at horses diving into pools and typewriters bigger than elephants.
On the day in 1976 when the state referendum passed, they danced
in the streets. Today Atlantic City has enough class to bring Cher,
the queen of camp, back to the concert stage, enough savvy to have
harvested $2.73 billion in the last year from bettors in its
casinos, and enough allure to be the most popular destination in
America. But the benefits of this resurrection have been unevenly
shared. "This is a town noted for taking suckers," says Thomas
Carver, president of the Casino Association of New Jersey. "But
it's the biggest sucker of all."

    Eleven years after the arrival of casinos, life in Atlantic
City is paradoxical to the point of perversity. Thirty-three
million people visit the city every year, and each day 1,300 tour
buses clog the streets. But since 1976 the local population has
shrunk 20%, to about 35,000, and residents continue to flee to the
suburbs. There are 18,103 slot machines, but no car washes, no
movie theaters and only one supermarket. And on Mother's Day,
people could not get to church because the Tour de Trump, a bicycle
race, blocked the roads that morning.

    The police-department budget has tripled to $24 million since
1976, but the crime rate is now the highest in the state. Atlantic
City has 7,472 casino hotel rooms, but its housing stock is down
by about 15% since 1980. The casinos have created 41,000 new jobs
-- more than the city's population -- but the welfare rolls are up,
and the number of overnight guests at the Rescue Mission has
swollen from an average of 25 in 1976 to 220 today.

    The city once called itself "the lungs of Philadelphia," but
residents now say that the exhaust fumes from tour buses make the
air unbreathable. Thanks to tax revenues from the casinos (more
than 63% of the $130 million raised annually), local property
owners are assessed less for public education than in most other
parts of the state. But the school superintendent has been fighting
for years with a casino over the purchase price of a parcel of land
needed to replace a leaky 65-year-old high school.

    All too often Atlantic City looks like a sneering caricature
of untrammeled capitalism. (This may explain why terrorists
threatening to retaliate against the U.S. on the third anniversary
of the American bombing of Libya were rumored to have chosen
Atlantic City as their target.) Along the Boardwalk stands a rank
of casinos nudged so close against the water that they seem to
teeter at its edge, their windows shut to the ocean air, their
backs turned to the city. Behind them cowers the neighborhood known
as the Inlet, where boxy row houses devolve into strange
confections of brick, plywood and cardboard, and people doze on
sleeping bags in doorless rooms with broken windows.

    Except for the barking of stray dogs, the Inlet is a quiet
neighborhood, not because of its tranquillity but because of its
gaps -- vacant lots where houses were razed and replaced by fields
of pink clover, Queen Anne's lace and beer-bottle shards. Here and
there are anachronistic gestures to elegance -- carved laurels in
a window casement, a Victorian turret, delicate porch columns --
that lend the scene the haunted air of a horror-movie set. At times
the Inlet seems just a bad joke. Standing over one bunker-style
housing project is a billboard touting one of developer Donald
Trump's two casinos: TRUMP CASTLE. WHERE BETTER IS NOT ENOUGH. Just
beyond the corner, in the distance, pokes the upswept prow of
Trump's 282-ft. yacht, the Trump Princess, at which local kids like
to throw rocks. Even Al Glasgow, who has knocked around Atlantic
City for 18 years and now publishes a newsletter on casinos, finds
the picture cataclysmic. "It's not the end of the world, but you
can almost see it from here," he says.

    For turning Atlantic City into an American monument to
self-delusion, the casinos blame the town, the town blames the
casinos, and everyone blames the state. All of them are right.

    In many ways, the casinos have achieved exactly what they were
supposed to. Because of them, Atlantic City's tax base is 21 times
as large as it was in 1976. In addition to all the new jobs, the
casinos have generated more than $1.8 billion in tax revenue for
the state, most of it earmarked for the elderly and handicapped.
"People see the contrast between the facilities we've put up and
the rest of the town, and they think, `What happened? Why did these
bastards not do what they were supposed to do?' The fact is, we
did," says Carver. "We came here to produce the money, not to run
the city."

    In some cases, the casinos' impact on the lives of Atlantic
City residents has been direct and enormous. Redenia Gilliam-Mosee,
41, is vice president of a casino in a city where she once worked
as a chambermaid. She had been moving up and away from her
childhood in the Inlet, earning a Ph.D. in urban planning at
Rutgers University, when Bally's Park Place Casino tapped her for
the job. Now she has transformed the row house where she grew up
into a modern testament to her faith in the neighborhood. Her
picture hangs inside Dave's Groceries nearby.

    Gilliam-Mosee's job is to create some goodwill between the city
and the casinos, a task that is just about impossible. The trouble
is that the two centers of power have completely different visions
for Atlantic City. At one extreme is Trump, who believes Atlantic
City should be turned into a giant nonresidential entertainment
park on the scale of Disneyland. At the other extreme is Benjamin
Fitzgerald, the city clerk since 1985. "Does Trump think people in
Atlantic City are going to be just like lemmings and go to the sea
and drown?" asks Fitzgerald. "This is an industry that spends over
$70 million a year in complimentary food, liquor, rooms, limousines
and helicopters. Why can't they pamper the residents?"

    Instead the casinos have sometimes behaved cavalierly -- even
arrogantly -- toward their hosts. Under an early, vague requirement
that casinos invest in Atlantic City, Caesars Atlantic City Hotel
Casino tried to get credit for the $625,000 statue of Caesar
Augustus that guards its entrance. Trump promised to build
affordable homes in Atlantic City when he bought Resorts
International Casino Hotel in 1987. Then last year he sold the
casino to entertainer Merv Griffin, leaving Griffin with $925
million in debt. "I gave that obligation to Merv," says Trump now.
"He got the debt, and he got the low-income housing." These days,
to satisfy a city beautification ordinance, Trump has tried to get
the Trump Plaza garage, a plain block of white concrete, declared
a work of art.

    One explanation for the casinos' failure to live up to their
civic responsibilities is that only five out of twelve posted a
profit last year. Overall, the casinos earned just $14.7 million
after expenses in 1988, a meager return on the $2.73 billion that
gamblers lost in the slot machines and at the tables, according to
Marvin Roffman, a casino analyst with Philadelphia's Janney
Montgomery Scott. The reason is the debt the casinos have taken on
in the past three years, much of it through junk bonds, either to
fight off takeovers or engineer them. Atlantic City's casinos have
incurred more than $2 billion in debt, $6 for every $1 of equity.
Some analysts say that next year, with the opening of Trump's Taj
Mahal, two of the weaker casinos may go under. "If they can't fend
for themselves, how can they possibly meet the greater social goal
of an urban renaissance?" asks Anthony Parrillo, director of New
Jersey's division of gaming enforcement.

    Casino executives, for their part, resent what they describe
as a city hall whose idea of governance has evolved little since
the 1930s, when the city's political boss Enoch L. ("Nucky")
Johnson, a carnation in his lapel, kept a paternalistic eye on the
rackets, the bordellos and the firehouses from a suite at the
Ritz-Carlton Hotel. From the 1890s until 1972, Atlantic City was
ruled by a succession of political machines, and while nothing
quite as feudal remains today, political leaders still seem to
exhibit the high-handed habits of that era. Only eight years ago,
the city commissioners passed a resolution ordering all municipal
employees to show them "respect and obedience."

    Most of the time, however, Atlantic City leaders seem content
with cash. Four of the past six mayors were charged with some kind
of official misconduct. In July the incumbent, James Usry, and 13
other officials, including three council members, were charged with
taking bribes. In a place where millions of dollars change hands
every day, the mayor is accused of accepting a paltry $6,000 from
an undercover agent to let electric passenger carts run along the
Boardwalk. "This town is like an aging whore," says Carver.
"Disrespect me, but give me something -- just give me something."

    Carver compares the standoff between the casinos and the city
to the "British army in Belfast," but a metaphor from neocolonial
Africa might be more apt. For in a city headed by its first black
mayor, with a gambling economy run largely by white accountants and
business school graduates, most of the civic tensions are
circumscribed by race. Two years ago, a suggestion by Carver that
the city's black administrator be replaced by "the best municipal
manager" was met at city hall with charges of "Ku Klux Klan"
tactics.

    In the city's precasino days, blacks and whites were at least
united in their municipal misery. Atlantic City once had a strong
pull on Philadelphians and New Yorkers seeking the seashore, but
air travel changed all that. When the city snagged the Democratic
National Convention in 1964, its creeping tawdriness became a
national story. By 1970 Atlantic City was the poorest town in New
Jersey but the richest in reported cases of contagious diseases.

    When the casinos finally came, they caught both the city and
the state completely unprepared. Then Governor Brendan Byrne was
so intent on keeping casinos out of the hands of organized crime
that much of his energy went into developing a body of law and a
bureaucracy that would do the job. As a result, the two regulatory
agencies that enforce the formidable Casino Control Act spend $59
million annually to police twelve casinos, in contrast to $15.7
million for 285 casinos in Nevada. The two agencies can, in the
words of Carl Zeitz, a former member of the casino-control
commission, fairly claim to have "legitimized the industry" in New
Jersey. But with all its attention focused on the Mob, the state
let eight years pass before establishing a mechanism to collect
revenues for the rebuilding of Atlantic City. "The biggest mistake
I ever made was not creating some kind of regional state authority
at the time," says Byrne.

    Not until 1986 did the casino reinvestment development
authority begin to do business. The agency is now preparing to
resurrect the Inlet by leading a $500 million investment program
for building heavily subsidized housing for the middle class. But
neither the casinos nor many of the Inlet's inhabitants have much
faith in the effort. "You can't mix caviar with tuna," says Dorothy
McCann from the rocker on the porch of her oceanfront Victorian
home. McCann, 71, has reason to sound ornery: the agency bought her
out last month as part of its raze-and-rebuild plan, despite the
headline-making campaign she waged to stay put. "My husband Frank
wants me to move out and go to a place where we'll have some nice
white neighbors," she says. "I'm thick."

    "You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days," says
Lou, an aging errand boy for the Mob played by Burt Lancaster in
Louis Malle's 1981 movie Atlantic City. Lou is strolling down the
Boardwalk, recalling the city's hip-swiveling days when a political
boss strolled on the Boardwalk in the company of Al Capone. "Now
it's all so goddamn legal," he mumbles. "Tutti-frutti ice cream and
craps don't mix."

    In Atlantic City they do, which is why the Boardwalk reflects
both a grandiloquence imported from Las Vegas and an insistence on
bourgeois comfort. Parading past the statue of Caesar Augustus
(finger aloft, as if hailing a cab), the Boardwalk crowd offers an
unself-conscious mixture: round middles barely disguised by
oversize T shirts or bulging above cinched-in belts; conical straw
hats; white socks in white sandals; baseball caps on balding heads;
male decolletage; painted eyebrows; sequins in the daytime;
polyester stretch pants; factory-knit acrylic cardigans; lots of
polka dots; colors usually found only at the extremities of a kid's
Crayola box.

    Gambling may have brought to Atlantic City a Pompeian profusion
of statues, but the city's long-standing sense of carnival still
flourishes. The casino boutiques may sell Gucci leather, but the
Boardwalk is a bazaar of plastic beads, mugs shaped like women's
breasts, and baby sand sharks in glass jars. When Las Vegas was
nothing but a jukebox in the desert, Atlantic City had clam-eating
tournaments and midget boxing matches; today one of the Boardwalk's
main attractions is Celestine Tate, a disabled woman who lies on
a stretcher like a beached mermaid and plays a Casio keyboard with
her tongue.

    Atlantic City always dreamed of attracting an upscale
clientele, and casinos now respect this myth with frescoes and wax
figures of slim-waisted maidens under dainty parasols, promenading
on the Boardwalk. But historians insist that even in its glory
days, Atlantic City was simply a Victorian Disneyland. A 1909
edition of a highbrow Baedeker tourist guide carried this
assessment: "Atlantic City is an eighth wonder of the world. It is
overwhelming in its crudeness -- barbaric, hideous and magnificent.
There is something colossal about its vulgarity."

    The same could be said about present-day Atlantic City, which
is, above all, Trump's town, with a Trump Plaza, Trump Castle,
Trump Princess and billboards all around the city trumpeting the
message YOU'RE LOOKING VERY TRUMP TODAY. When his Aladdin-style Taj
Mahal is completed next spring, Trump will control 31% of the
city's gaming capacity, 39% of the first-class hotel rooms, 40% of
the convention space, 35% of the parking spaces and almost half a
mile of frontage along the five-mile Boardwalk. "I'll tell you,
it's Big Business," he says, peering down on the city from his
helicopter. "If there is one word to describe Atlantic City, it's
Big Business. Or two words: Big Business."

    With Trump, Atlantic City has rediscovered its genius for
self-promotion. And largely thanks to him the city has regained
its cheerful taste for the baroque. In the lobby of the Trump Plaza
(designed by Alan Lapidus, who once wrote an article called "The
Architecture of Gorgeous"), Mary Zborey, a heavily rouged tourist
from Connecticut who resembles a slightly dissipated Loretta Lynn,
turns giddy at the shimmering collision in the red, gold and black
decor. "I can't believe it. I'm touching the walls," she squeals
as she caresses a black marble railing. Her friend Maryann
Scofield, caught up in the delirium, chimes in, "You've got to see
it. Marble and mirrors and brass. We want to meet Trump." Zborey
interrupts. "Gold," she says, reaching down to touch a decorative
strip of brass. "I see gold. I don't know what to say."

    The executive director of the Plaza, Jonathan Benanav, calls
the aesthetic principle behind casinos "sensory bombardment." He
puts it this way: "Feel? It feels good to be here. Taste? Well,
there are two ways to look at that. No. 1, Trump has great taste.
No. 2, we have great food facilities. Touch? You're touching money.
You're touching luxury. You're touching the marble. You're touching
the granite. You're touching the beautiful brass. You'll see in the
suites. We have gold leaf up there."

    And so much more. Fat plaster cherubs, blue and gold velvet
divans, pop-up televisions, living-room Jacuzzis surrounded by
Corinthian columns and topped by mirrors, gold-painted
toothbrushes, even bidets and brass DO NOT DISTURB signs. Boasts
Trump: "You can go to London. You can go to Paris. You can go
anywhere in the world. There are no suites comparable to the
quality of these suites."

    Sensory bombardment can be fun, especially for high rollers
like Lisa Wishnick, a vivacious platinum blond from New York City
who recently persuaded her oil-executive husband to celebrate their
13th anniversary with a weekend in Atlantic City. The people who
track the betting at Merv Griffin's Resorts Hotel and Casino
estimate that the Wishnicks have access to a $50,000 line of
credit, so everything but the gambling is complimentary: the
48-minute helicopter ride, the mauve suite, even the caviar. Never
mind that just about everyone else in the casino is dressed for
mowing the lawn, Wishnick slinks into an azure silk ensemble with
a slit up the side, slips a new seven-carat ring on her finger,
straps on a pair of silver slippers and sips champagne before
setting off for a meal of lobster thermidor. Then it's
"Woooooooooow. O.K., roll those babies! Come on! Numbers! Numbers!
Numbers!" As Wishnick screams louder and starts to shake all over,
the crowd begins chanting, "Eight! Eight! Eight!" At the end of the
roll, she walks away from the craps table $5,000 richer.

    The gambling floors are like giant pinball machines turned
inside out: clangorous, noisy places where time is measured in
chips remaining, where art can be Michelangelo's David in extra
large, where employees are costumed as giant diamonds or Roman
vestals in mini-togas. Amid all this, the ritual extraction of
money produces shrieks, groans and -- sometimes -- incongruously
grim determination. On his first night as a $25,000-a-year dealer,
Larry Brown saw a gambler suffer a stroke. "What really shocked me
is how the players reacted, how they continued making their bets,
reaching over him and stuff," he says.

    The spell is sustained by the tacit bargain between casinos
and gamblers -- limitless consolation in the form of drinks and
obsequiousness for money lost. "You don't see Rockefellers gambling
down here," says Brown. "They have to feel like a big shot. When
they walk in, we know their name, and that's the biggest thing we
do for them." For most players, however, gambling is simply a
thrilling adventure on the edge of willpower -- risk taking at its
safest, with fantasy and freebies thrown in. "Atlantic City is a
better break than Wall Street, and you can put the money in your
pocket," says William A. Fountain, a food salesman who heads for
Harrah's Marina Hotel Casino every Saturday.

    At row after row of slot machines, women stand quietly in the
aisles, holding plastic cups full of coins that blacken their
hands, eating morsels buried in their purses and pulling levers
hour after hour, as if at work in a stamping factory. Most are
elderly, but their backs are straight, and their eyes are
hypnotically fixed on the spinning fruit as the winning coins hit
the metal troughs in twos and tens and -- rarely -- jackpot
hemorrhages.

    This is the Social Security crowd, whose imperturbable coin
stuffing accounted in large part for 55% of Atlantic City's gaming
win last year. From the street corners of New York City to the
hamlets of Pennsylvania, these gamblers in thick-soled white
sneakers begin their pilgrimages at dawn, first making their way
to deserted parking lots or pick-up points, then wobbling up the
bus steps, down the aisle and into a seat. For Josephine Baumann,
71, a retired cook with the face of Edith Bunker, the trip to
Bally's Park Place on a recent Wednesday is a welcome -- and cheap
-- respite from arthritis, television and the addicts and
prostitutes on her midtown Manhattan block. "I even forget my
name," she says. The trip actually costs nothing: in exchange for
her $18 Gray Line ticket, the casino refunds $15 in coins plus a
$5 coupon off on the next trip.

    Many of the travelers are old enough and isolated enough to
need the trip as a passage out of lonely routines and back into
society. Driver Michael Torrey pulls up to the casino around 11:30
a.m. and waits as his passengers move inside to swap their coupons
for coins. "You'd think she'd need a walker," he says, pointing at
an elderly tourist painfully climbing a ramp to the Boardwalk. "But
she's in Atlantic City. Look at the willpower she has."

    Some of the losers wind up at the Atlantic City Rescue Mission.
Its population has included an Egyptian mathematician, a scholar
from Hong Kong and a retired Israeli brigadier general who was a
well-to-do appliance distributor in Jerusalem. William Southrey,
the mission's director of ministries, once picked up a hitchhiker
who turned out to be his old high school teacher and coach.

    The mission's overnight guests like to say they are passing
through on their way to something better. Michael, a weasel-faced
gambler who landed there after blowing his last $11,000 at craps,
says he will soon be reconciled with his wife in New Jersey and on
his way to Florida. "We're talking about getting out. Building a
little house, a little boat. Soon." John, who last made a living
recycling cans, was lured to Atlantic City by one of Trump's ads.
"I'm going back to see my daughter in Tacoma. If I can ever get out
of here," he says.

    But John may find that Atlantic City does not easily release
its grip. History and geography have bestowed on the city a curious
destiny as a metaphysical place on the edge of ordinary life. "It's
the end of the railroad line. It's the end of the bus line. It's
the end of the airline. It's the end of the expressway," says Barry
Durman, the mission's director. "Once you get here, where do you
go?"