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?"

With reporting by Stephen Pomper and Sue Raffety/Atlantic City