A photographic history of Atlantic City, New Jersey, chronicles the city's early days as a premier seaside resort, its decline through the mid-twentieth century, and its twenty-first-century incarnation as an entertainment and gambling mecca, examining such landmarks as its famed boardwalk, its role as the birthplace of the Monopoly game and the Miss America pageant, and more.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "James and Deborah Fallows have always moved to where history is being made.... They have an excellent sense of where world-shaping events are taking place at any moment" —The New York Times • The basis for the HBO documentary streaming on HBO Max For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.
During the first half of the twentieth century, Atlantic City was the nation's most popular middle-class resort--the home of the famed Boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant, and the board game Monopoly. By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journalists to bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, and the highway has replaced the Boardwalk as the city's most important thoroughfare. Today the city doesn't have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress protected by metal detectors and security guards. In this wide-ranging book, Bryant Simon does far more than tell a nostalgic tale of Atlantic City's rise, near death, and reincarnation. He turns the depiction of middle-class vacationers into a revealing discussion of the boundaries of public space in urban America. In the past, he argues, the public was never really about democracy, but about exclusion. During Atlantic City's heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. The overly boisterous or improperly dressed were kept out of theaters and hotel lobbies by uniformed ushers and police. The creation of Atlantic City as the "Nation's Playground" was dependent on keeping undesirables out of view unless they were pushing tourists down the Boardwalk on rickshaw-like rolling chairs or shimmying in smoky nightclubs. Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city's public spaces more open and democratic, too open and democratic for many middle-class Americans, who fled to suburbs and suburban-style resorts like Disneyworld. With the opening of the first casino in 1978, the urban balance once again shifted, creating twelve separate, heavily guarded, glittering casinos worlds walled off from the dilapidated houses, boarded-up businesses, and lots razed for redevelopment that never came. Tourists are deliberately kept away from the city's grim reality and its predominantly poor African American residents. Despite ten of thousands of buses and cars rolling into every day, gambling has not saved Atlantic City or returned it to its glory days. Simon's moving narrative of Atlantic City's past points to the troubling fate of urban America and the nation's cultural trajectory in the twentieth century, with broad implications for those interested in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, and history.
The Bretton Woods, New Hampshire conference that established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in 1944 was highly publicized then and remains well known today. The secretive Atlantic City, New Jersey conference that occurred immediately before Bretton Woods and laid the groundwork for it has never received much attention. The conference was notable for the presence of John Maynard Keynes, the most famous economist of the 20th century, as leader of the British delegation, and Harry Dexter White, later revealed to have passed secrets to the Soviet Union, as leader of the American delegation. Kurt Schuler and Gabrielle Canning have collected the conference minutes and related documents, and have added an introduction, annotations, and commentary to make them readily understandable.
Few American resort cities rival the romantic slpendor of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Since 1854, this island has evoked dreams and memories of days lived amid white sand beaches, a vibrant boardwalk, exciting amusement piers, and grand hotels. For decades it was a place where teenagers fell in love, returned for honeymoons, and later brought families. Atlantic Cities is a nostalgic return to the pre-casino days that now seem relatively innocent. The founders believed that the city would become a grand health resort, featuring healthful sea breezes and balmy days. Nearly deserted when the first train loaded with day-trippers arrived on July 1, 1854, Atlantic City, by 1900, was known throughout much of the world as "The Queen of American Resorts." With huge hotels lining the Boardwalk and unique amusement piers jutting into the ocean, the city thrived on what one promoter called "ocean, emotion, and constant promotion." Those were the days when bathers frolicked on the beach in drab clothing, when the Boardwalk was alive with throngs of happy visitors, and Miss America actually strolled the Boardwalk amid the crowds. Images like those, and of course of the annual Easter Parade, one of the East Coast's premier social events, are among the nearly two hundred photographs carefully selected for this long-awaited book.
The rescue of the last diving horse in America and the inspiring story of how horse and animal rescuer were each profoundly transformed by the other—from the award-winning animal rescuer of retired racing greyhounds and author of the best-selling Adopting the Racing Greyhound It was the signature of Atlantic City’s Steel Pier in the golden age of “America’s Favorite Playground”: Doc Carver’s High Diving Horses. Beginning in 1929, four times a day, seven days a week, a trained horse wearing only a harness ran up a ramp, a diving girl in a bathing suit and helmet jumped onto its mighty bare back, and together they sailed forty feet through the air, plunging, to thunderous applause, into a ten-foot-deep tank of water. Decades later, after cries of animal abuse and changing times, the act was shuttered, and in May 1980, the last Atlantic City Steel Pier diving horse was placed on the auction block in Indian Mills, New Jersey. The author, who had seen the act as a child and had been haunted by it, was now working with Cleveland Amory, the founding father of the modern animal protection movement, and she was, at the last minute, sent on a rescue mission: bidding for the horse everyone had come to buy, some for the slaughterhouse (they dropped out when the bidding exceeded his weight). The author’s winning bid: $2,600—and Gamal, gleaming-coated, majestic, commanding, was hers; she who knew almost nothing about horses was now the owner of the last diving horse in America. Cynthia Branigan tells the magical, transformative story of how horse and new owner (who is trying to sort out her own life, feeling somewhat lost herself and in need of rescuing) come to know each other, educate each other, and teach each other important lessons of living and loving. She writes of providing a new home for Gamal, a farm with plentiful fields of rich, grazing pasture; of how Gamal, at age twenty-six, blossoms in his new circumstances; and of the special bond that slowly grows and deepens between them, as Gamal tests the author and grows to trust her, and as she grows to rely upon him as friend, confidant, teacher. She writes of her search for Gamal’s past: moved from barn to barn, from barrel racer to rodeo horse, and ending up on the Steel Pier; how his resilience and dignity throughout those years give deep meaning to his life; and how in understanding this, the author is freed from her own past, which had been filled with doubts and fears and darkness. Branigan writes of the history of diving horses and of how rescuing and caring for Gamal led to her saving other animals—burros, llamas, and goats—first as company for Gamal and then finding homes for them all; and, finally, saving a ten-year-old retired greyhound called King—despondent, nearly broken in spirit—who, running free in the fields with Gamal, comes back to his happy self and opens up for the author a whole new surprising but purposeful world. A captivating tale of the power of animals and the love that can heal the heart and restore the soul.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A mystery that reverberates through families, friendships, and the corridors of power in New York and "captures the city’s dangerous, magnetic allure" (The New York Times). • Streaming now on Apple TV+ “As close to a great American novel as this century has produced.” —Stephen King New York City, 1976. Meet Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city’s great fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by downtown’s punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter and his idealistic neighbor—and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park on New Year’s Eve. When the blackout of July 13, 1977, plunges this world into darkness, each of these lives will be changed forever. City on Fire is an unforgettable novel about love and betrayal and forgiveness, about art and truth and rock ’n’ roll: about what people need from each other in order to live—and about what makes the living worth doing in the first place.
“The perfect summer read” (USA TODAY) begins with a shocking tragedy that results in three generations of the Adler family grappling with heartbreak, romance, and the weight of family secrets over the course of one summer. *A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice * One of USA TODAY’s “Best Books of 2020” * One of Good Morning America’s “25 Novels You'll Want to Read This Summer” * One of Parade’s “26 Best Books to Read This Summer” Atlantic City, 1934. Every summer, Esther and Joseph Adler rent their house out to vacationers escaping to “America’s Playground” and move into the small apartment above their bakery. Despite the cramped quarters, this is the apartment where they raised their two daughters, Fannie and Florence, and it always feels like home. Now, Florence has returned from college, determined to spend the summer training to swim the English Channel, and Fannie, pregnant again after recently losing a baby, is on bedrest for the duration of her pregnancy. After Joseph insists they take in a mysterious young woman whom he recently helped emigrate from Nazi Germany, the apartment is bursting at the seams. Esther only wants to keep her daughters close and safe but some matters are beyond her control: there’s Fannie’s risky pregnancy—not to mention her always-scheming husband, Isaac—and the fact that the handsome heir of a hotel notorious for its anti-Semitic policies, seems to be in love with Florence. When tragedy strikes, Esther makes the shocking decision to hide the truth—at least until Fannie’s baby is born—and pulls the family into an elaborate web of secret-keeping and lies, bringing long-buried tensions to the surface that reveal how quickly the act of protecting those we love can turn into betrayal. “Readers of Emma Straub and Curtis Sittenfeld will devour this richly drawn debut family saga” (Library Journal) that’s based on a true story and is a breathtaking portrayal of how the human spirit can endure—and even thrive—after tragedy.
Winner of the 2021 Edgar Award for Best First Novel In this “beautifully written, thoughtful page-turner” (Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists) from “the next big voice in crime fiction” (Susan Scarf Merrell, author of Shirley), two young women become unlikely friends during one fateful summer in Atlantic City as mysterious disappearances hit dangerously close to home. Summer has come to Atlantic City but the boardwalk is empty of tourists, the casino lights have dimmed, and two Jane Does are laid out in the marshland behind the Sunset Motel, just west of town. Only one person even knows they’re there. Meanwhile, Clara, a young boardwalk psychic, struggles to attract clients for the tarot readings that pay her rent. When she begins to experience very real and disturbing visions, she suspects they could be related to the recent cases of women gone missing in town. When Clara meets Lily, an ex-Soho art gallery girl who is working at a desolate casino spa and reeling from a personal tragedy, she thinks Lily may be able to help her. But Lily has her own demons to face. If they can put the pieces together in time, they may save another lost girl—so long as their efforts don’t attract perilous attention first. “You won’t be able to stop turning the pages of this heartbreaking” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and compelling psychological thriller that explores the intersection of womanhood, power, and violence.
