Sponsored by
Lingerie Football League tryouts Shore nostalgia: Then & Now 
FROM THE MOMENT Resorts International (now Resorts Atlantic City) opened its doors 31 years ago, there has been opposition to legal gambling's presence in Atlantic City.
Some critics cite the toll - gambling addiction and an increase in crime (especially prostitution) - casinos can take on society. Others have decried gaming halls and their attendant amenities as an affront to the town's glorious past as a wholesome, family-friendly destination.
Both groups are obviously well-intentioned. But those subscribing to the latter philosophy are also misguided, if not downright delusional.
A mythology about Atlantic City's past as a sort-of proto-Orlando has evolved through the decades. But the truth is that its current status as a filling station for peoples' baser desires is nothing more than a continuation of a legacy that began way before the vociferous gambling opponents were gleams in their parents' - or grandparents' - eyes.
To put it another way, Atlantic City is, was and, if the past is indeed prologue, always will be Sodom-by-the-Sea.
That the city was ever anything but a boardwalk-rimmed den of inequity is "absolutely a myth," said Atlantic County Superior Court Judge Nelson Johnson. He's the author of "Boardwalk Empire" (Plexus Publishing, $18.95), a definitive account of Atlantic City's naughty, bawdy and gaudy history and the three corrupt overlords who reigned during a good chunk of its 155-year existence.
According to Johnson, whose 2002 book is being developed as an HBO miniseries by Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese, from the time of its founding in 1854, Atlantic City's raison d'etre was to "give the people what they want."
To buttress his point, he cited a quote from the late Murray Fredericks, a local attorney who explained the town's vice-ridden history this way: "If people came for Bible readings, we would have given them that. But nobody asked for Bible readings. They came for booze, broads and gambling, and that's what we gave them."
Atlantic City's position as Sin City USA (or as author-historian Vicki Gold-Levi has described it, "Las Vegas before there was a Las Vegas") was established during the Victorian Era, when less-than-noble pursuits, carnal and otherwise, were looked upon harshly by mainstream society.
By the waning years of the 19th century, vice had become as important to the tourism industry as the beach and ocean.
In "By the Beautiful Sea: The Rise and High Times of That Great American Resort, Atlantic City" (Rutgers University Press), a 1983 scholarly study of the city's early decades, the late Charles Funnell wrote of prostitution being so widespread and open that a visitor could avail himself of widely circulated directories listing such things as the ages, races and sexual specialties of the town's working girls.
The book notes the Aug. 9, 1890, edition of the Philadelphia Bulletin (whose yearly exposes of Atlantic City's vice rackets, said Johnson, were met with bemused indifference by civic leaders) identified the names and locations of 24 brothels, including "May Woodson's pestilence hole, and the 'Sea Breeze' ."
It was during this time that Louis "the Commodore" Kuehnle Jr. (1858-1934), the first of the city's three omnipotent rackets bosses, used political corruption to solidify the resort's reputation as a place where anything goes. But it was under his successor, Enoch "Nucky" Johnson, that Atlantic City reached its between-World-Wars apex as the nation's leading adult playground.
Nominally, the Republican Johnson (1883-1968) served for decades as Atlantic County's sheriff and undersheriff (office-holders couldn't succeed themselves, so he ping-ponged between the two jobs). But his real occupation was overseeing - and taking a cut of - the city's prostitution, gambling and (once Prohibition became law in 1919) bootlegging operations.
The 1920s really did roar in Nucky Johnson's Atlantic City.
Flouting Prohibition was a natural for Atlantic City, reasoned Judge Johnson, who is not related to Nucky Johnson.
|
|
|
|
|
|
NEWS
Philly.com Promotions
