The skeptics didn’t know, or had forgotten, that Atlantic City had a history of turning negatives into positives. Could casinos work outside of Nevada? Could the Mob be kept out? Or would Atlantic City be let down again? Long lines outside Resorts International as the first day of legal gambling begins, May 26, 1978.Īt first, there was much skepticism about Atlantic City. Atlantic City had reinvented itself as the casino capital of the East. Two years later, on May 26, 1978, Resorts International opened to crowds that stretched down the Boardwalk. The 1974 referendum to legalize casinos statewide on local option failed, but Atlantic City got a second chance in 1976 when New Jersey voters approved a bill that legalized casinos only in the city itself. But even that didn’t work the first time around. Forty years on, Atlantic City began to rally behind the idea of legalized gambling as a chance for a fresh start.

Over the next decade, investment stopped, hotels closed, and unemployment spiked.įailure to keep up with competing destinations had doomed Atlantic City ‘s first extended run as a leisure destination. With the nomination of Lyndon Johnson a foregone conclusion, many reporters instead focused on how dilapidated, overpriced, and downright inhospitable the city had become. The 1964 Democratic National Convention was a catastrophe for Atlantic City, which had lobbied for years to host the political meeting. White’s proposal only got new life after the city hit a new low. Indeed, the Claridge Hotel, which opened in 1930, was the last high-rise built until the casino era. Too few listened, and the city chugged along with few major changes. The city was only an economic downturn from its period of greatest prosperity, but White already felt drastic action was needed. In 1935, Mayor Charles White outlined a bold, three-pronged masterplan to save Atlantic City: first, a section of the beach reserved for cabanas catering to the super-rich then, an area with amusements and attractions for those less well-off that would dethrone New York’s Coney Island and finally, a gambling casino and racetrack that would become the Monte Carlo of America.

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