Atlantic City
What they wanted was Monte Carlo. They didn't want Las
Vegas.
What they got was Las Vegas. We always knew that they would get
Las Vegas .
Stuart Mendelson, Philadelphia Journal, 1978.
ATLANTIC CITY , on Absecon Island just off the midpoint
of the Jersey shoreline, has been a tourist magnet since 1854, when
Philadelphia speculators created it as a rail terminal resort. In
The real-life model for the board game Monopoly , it has an
impressive history of popular culture, boasting the nation's first
Boardwalk (1870), the world's first Big Wheel (1892),
the first color postcards (1893) and the first Miss
America Beauty Pageant (cunningly devised to extend the tourist
season in 1921, and still held here yearly). During Prohibition and
the Depression, Atlantic City was a center for rum-running, packed
with speakeasies and illegal gambling dens. Thereafter, in the face
of increasing competition from Florida, it slipped into a steep
decline, until city officials decided in 1976 to open up the resort
to legal gambling .
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