IN THE NAME OF HER FATHER

By STEVE LOPEZ

For more than 30 years you live in a nice house on a quiet street, and then one day there's a knock at the door. It's a man who informs you that your home is going to be bulldozed to make way for a roadway tunnel to a new casino. Sorry about that. But the owner of the casino wants to do the right thing and pay you to wake the kids, call the movers and start packing. Just sign right here, please.

Lillian E. Bryant, 53, knew just what to do, and so did several other residents of Horace Bryant Jr. Drive in Atlantic City, N.J. They looked that man in the eye, pointed to the door and told him to get lost. "It's total arrogance," fumes Bryant, who had one more reason than her neighbors to be ticked off. The street she lives on is named after her father, a former state banking and insurance commissioner who died in 1983. She and her mother Lillian W., 86, wouldn't think of leaving. "I can't," Lillian W. says. "It isn't right. And how could I look for another place and start all over at my age? I'm too old for that."

But the Bryants have grown more and more alone in voicing opposition in the year and a half since Mirage casino mogul Steve Wynn said he would build a Las Vegas-style extravaganza a mile from the Boardwalk in Atlantic City's Marina district. The women do have Donald Trump--that renowned champion of the little guy--on their team. How could so many politicians bend over backward to please an out-of-town money changer? asks the man who would be in direct competition with Wynn. Oh, the hypocrisy! But even Donald has been trumped. Seven of the 10 homeowners on Bryant Drive have said yes to Wynn's buyout offer, because either they liked the terms or they decided there was no way to slay a giant. It's Atlantic City, after all, where Monopoly is no game. Buy four houses and you can build a hotel. "It's a done deal," said carpenter Clarence Mobley, 46, on the porch of a Bryant Drive house he built himself. He said the offer he accepted from Wynn was about $200,000, which is maybe twice the market value.

The Bryants have a billboard-size NO TUNNEL sign in front of their split-level, four-bedroom house. But they can almost hear the bulldozer creeping closer, with bids on the roadway project due this week, and it isn't just Steve Wynn who's behind the wheel. If the bids are within projections, he will have New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman and Atlantic City Mayor James Whelan with him, all of them preaching the gospel of small personal sacrifices for the greater public good. If you build it, suckers will come. As will thousands of jobs, millions of dollars in tax revenues and a rising tide of new prosperity that "will float all boats," as Whitman's flack says.

"Tell me about it," says Lillian E., a retired city employee who heard the same hustle when the casinos came to town 20 years ago. Today, Bryant's neighborhood is the last stable, middle-class, mostly black area in all of boom-or-bust Atlantic City. Bryant says she's not against new casinos, she's against uprooting good neighborhoods so outsiders can pretend they're in Shangri-La. "Steve Wynn must have something good on these people. The state is bickering about having to pay $200 million for public education by an order of the Supreme Court, but they'll spend $300 million to build a private driveway for a billionaire."

In fact, Wynn would pay $55 million of the projected $330 million cost of the 1.8-mile roadway. Wynn spokesman Alan Feldman, who shamelessly wonders if the holdout residents are trying to bluff more money out of Mirage, says the project will provide road improvements that were planned years ago and will make the neighborhood a better place. Mayor Whelan insists that other roadway routes would have displaced even more homeowners. He's sorry about Bryant Drive, but if Atlantic City doesn't take this next step--"Not just another casino, but an 'Oh, wow!' destination resort"--it will die. He says Circus Circus and Boyd Gaming may build next to Mirage's planned Le Jardin, which will resemble a gigantic terrarium.

They could have Siegfried and Roy swinging from vines, and it wouldn't change the take on Bryant Drive. Residents and three homeowner associations lost a lawsuit to block the takeover, which is now on appeal. In March the same group filed suit in federal court, alleging a civil rights violation. The state stands prepared to wield the power of eminent domain, a legal term meaning "we can do anything we want." But the Bryants and their neighbors--Gussie Ellis and her family of five, and Pierre Hollingsworth's family of three, which rents from a local minister--are digging in. The street was named after a man who stood for something, Lillian W. said in her living room. "My husband was a fighter, and he wouldn't have allowed this. We're not going anywhere."