The Last Good Time : Skinny D'Amato, the Notorious 500 Club, and the Rise and Fall of Atlantic City

Book by Van Meter Jonathan

Atlantic City has always been an extraordinarily weird and misunderstood place. My Atlantic City of the late eighties was, in many ways, not all that different from the resort that Skinny lorded over for thirty years, beginning in the early forties. The city itself sits at the northern end of Absecon Island, a narrow, ten-mile-long strand separated from the mainland of New Jersey by seven miles of water and wetlands. Four towns make up the island--Atlantic City, Ventnor, Margate, and Longport--all of them accessible by causeways and bridges. One of the things many first-time visitors miss when they go to Atlantic City is the rest of the island, which is lovely and, in certain places, swanky. I have come to think of Ventnor and Margate as the Beverly Hills of south Jersey, as both towns are choked with block after block of huge mansions built over the last hundred years in every imaginable architectural style. "Atlantic City slammers" is the excellent phrase I once heard someone use to describe these hulking beauties.

When I arrived in Atlantic City I knew very little about the island, with its odd mixture of booming, new-money casino culture, blighted urban landscape, picturesque beaches, wealthy cloistered neighborhoods, and vibrantly seedy black and gay communities. I grew up at the Jersey shore in the seventies, just thirty miles south of Absecon Island, yet I had been to Atlantic City exactly once by the age of twenty-one. There was almost no reason to bother, as the city was a crumbling ghost town. I was in the marching band in high school, and during my sophomore year, in 1979, we marched in a parade on the Boardwalk. By that time, the referendum on gambling had passed and Resorts International had opened its doors, but the city was still mostly just sad.

I will never forget the strange and intoxicating feeling I had that day, a feeling of being suspended in time, with the beautiful empty beach on one side of us as we marched down the Boardwalk and the once majestic, now rotten city on the other side. The rides, arcades, stalls, and shops were padlocked, and the famous Steel Pier had been closed for years. It was as if the Apocalypse had finally come and we in the parade and its meager bystanders were the only people left.

My grandfather played the trumpet in a big band in nightclubs all around the Northeast when he was young; he spent a lot of time in Atlantic City in the thirties and forties, and I had heard stories about the fun he had had there in the sprawling supper clubs and the backalley speakeasies and the people who came from hundreds of miles to dance to the swing bands. I had heard about--and had seen old black-and-white photographs of--the Easter parades that rivaled Fifth Avenue's and drew hundreds of thousands to the Boardwalk in their suits and hats, the dancing in expansive ballrooms that jutted over the ocean on huge piers.

By the time I was a teenager, though, all that was gone. The resort began its slow and inexorable decline as early as the late 1940s, with the gradual bankrupting of the railroads and the growth of cheap jet travel to warmer, more exotic places, like Miami and the Caribbean. Because Atlantic City had been built up over the first half of the century in the frantic ad hoc manner of most seashore resorts, its buildings, under constant assault from the salty sea air, were beginning literally to crumble. The city had reached its nadir by the early 1970s. The whole urban center had been transformed into one great big slum, with most businesses closing and young people bailing out, leaving the blighted remains to the senior citizens and poor blacks, who couldn't afford to escape.

But when I came to work at the magazine in 1985, things were looking up. Along the Boardwalk, modern towers were rising as quickly as Donald Trump, Steve Wynn, and Hugh Hefner could build them, but there were still traces of the old Atlantic City. The gigantic, turn-of-the-century "wedding cake" hotels, the rooming houses along the beach, and Club Harlem on Kentucky Avenue were still standing, as was the White House Sub Shop, Angelo's Fairmont Tavern, Tony's Baltimore Grille, Dock's Oyster House, the Irish Pub & Inn, the Knife & Fork Inn, and a handful of other institutions from the old days (many of which have pictures of Skinny hanging prominently on their walls). Up near the Inlet--a burned-out neighborhood not so affectionately called "South Bronx-by-the-sea"--stands what remains of the redbrick Chalfonte- Haddon Hall. Once one of the largest hotels in the world, the structures were built by Quakers who for decades refused to sell alcohol on the premises. After a multimillion-dollar renovation, the building, painted white, is now home to Resorts International, the first casino to open after New Jersey legalized "gaming" (christened as such in a vain attempt to imbue the new industry with a sense of good, clean fun).

Set back from the Boardwalk, with scrappy little Brighton Park splayed out before it, stands the Claridge, the last and most austere of the great Atlantic City hotels. Built of red brick in 1930, it was at the time the tallest hotel in the resort. Today, it's the only one that's been somewhat faithfully restored to its original luster--at least on the outside. Like Resorts, Bally made use of part of the shell of an old hotel--the Dennis--but you can barely tell what it once looked like, as it was partially demolished to make way for a huge purple-and-silver glass tower that is lit like a plastic Christmas tree.

There are certain things about Atlantic City that newcomers learn very quickly. There are no supermarkets or movie theaters in the city; you have to drive offshore or "downbeach," as they say locally, to buy groceries or see a film. Until recently, there was not a single miniature golf course, which is strange for a Jersey shore town. In lieu of normal public transportation, Atlantic City has jitneys, little pale blue buses that look like bread trucks, which run up and down the island, picking up and discharging people as they go. Stranger still are the Boardwalk's rolling chairs, the resort's answer to the rickshaw, imported from Philadelphia's centennial celebration of 1876. Bars are allowed to stay open around the clock, and many do, which lends an air of desperation to certain parts of town. New York Avenue was once a thriving gay mecca, though today there's not a single gay bar left on that strip. The rest of the gay community has scattered to the winds.

The city has its traditions, too. The most famous and most bizarre is Miss America week in September, considered sacred by many of the locals and duly celebrated with parades and parties and drag shows and, of course, the event itself, which continues--even as the pageant tries to reinvent itself--to bring out Atlantic City's crusty, odd society to their reserved seats. The pageant has been held since 1921 in Atlantic City and since 1929 in Convention Hall, a building that spans seven acres (two city blocks) and--with no pillars--was for many years the largest unobstructed room in the world. It seats forty-one thousand people and features the world's largest pipe organ. In 1973, Miss America was flown around inside the huge room in a helicopter.

Most of the middle- to upper-middle-class white population live in Chelsea, or farther downbeach, in Ventnor, Margate, and Longport. The black population, many of whose families have been in Atlantic City since the Civil War, live uptown or in the Inlet. At the turn of the century, 25 percent of Atlantic City's population was black (compared with 2 percent in New York); today, more than half of the population is black. Throughout the eighties, "the World's Playground," as it has been called since the early 1900s, was the most visited resort in the country--more than Las Vegas, more than Disneyland--with nearly thirty million visitors a year. When I moved to town, Atlantic City was in the midst of a boom. There were already eleven hotel-casinos doing business to the tune of $2.15 billion a year in total earnings--just slightly less than the total earnings of the over one hundred and thirty licensed establishments in and around Las Vegas.

Even today, everywhere you look in Atlantic City there are signs of what used to be the ghostly outline of a nightclub or a hotel on a block that was once teeming and fabulous. Everywhere else you look you see the potential of what's to come, a city trying so hard to reinvent itself that you can practically hear the local officials' collective heaving. It is impossible to experience the now of Atlantic City, however, because the whole place is suspended somewhere between the past and the future. It is no longer what it was, and it is not yet what it will one day be. And it is this quality--the rotting, tarnished city of yore, improbably yoked to the glittering temples of corporate ambition--that gives Atlantic City its frisson. It is a gorgeous and haunted place.

Like any well-meaning addict who tries and fails to get clean over and over again, Atlantic City wants to be a better and different kind of city, but the forces aligned against it are just too great. In spite of the extraordinary success of legalized gambling, the resort has had a very difficult time reinventing itself and bouncing back to life. One formidable obstacle is its lack of attractive natural resources. Most of the world's resorts--Miami, Rio, Monte Carlo--exist in such physically spectacular locales that even if they fall on hard times, their intrinsic value can never be diminished. Someone will always come along to rediscover or "save" them.

Atlantic City was built on an unremarkable ten-mile-long strip of sand. There is a beach, but the character of the island before it was transformed in the late nineteenth century was one of windswept isolation, with a landscape of fine, white sand dunes that reached as high as fifty feet, cedar oak and holly trees, duck ponds, swamps, and briar thickets. In the summer, the place swarmed with mosquitoes and greenhead flies. Black snakes, foxes, rabbits, muskrats, and mink infested the island. Not exactly a paradise in waiting.

But that is precisely what made Atlantic City's first heyday in the Victorian era so incredible--it had created so much from so little so quickly. All of Atlantic City's resources--what drew so many people to the island--were unnatural, which is to say man-made. The machine--the railroad--was what made Atlantic City possible, and then the Boardwalk, the colossal hotels, the gigantic piers, and the crowds followed.

The uninhabited island was known as Absegami, or "Little Sea Water," to the Lenni-Lenape Indians, who used it in the summer months, traveling over a five-mile trail through the marshlands and then rowing across the bay. The Lenni-Lenape gave up their rights to all of south Jersey in a trade with white colonists for things like iron kettles, hoes, knives, and axes. The earliest white landowner was an Englishman named Thomas Budd, a Quaker farmer who arrived in Atlantic County in the late 1670s. The colonists dubbed the strand "Further Island." In 1678, Budd bought fifteen thousand acres of land in Atlantic County--some of it on the island--from William Penn and a group of Quakers, who had received it as payment of a debt owed to them. Budd was basically swindled; the land was, at four cents an acre, practically worthless.

The first official residents were the Leeds, led by the reclusive oddball Jeremiah, who built a log cabin around 1785, the first permanent structure on the island at what is now Missouri and Arctic Avenues (almost exactly the spot where Skinny D'Amato would be born and raised and would build his nightclub over 150 years later). Jeremiah's tiny cedar cabin eventually grew into Leed's Plantation, where corn and rye were farmed and cattle raised after he and his ten children cleared the land. He slowly bought up every parcel he could get his hands on, and by the time of his death he owned all but 131 acres (just 1 percent) of what he had called Absecon Island. Jeremiah's sons, Robert and Chalkley, grew up to become the city's first postmaster and mayor, respectively, in 1854. After Jeremiah died in 1838, his second wife, Millicent, got a license to operate Aunt Millie's Boarding House, located where Baltic and Massachusetts Avenues are today. "Boardinghouse" was a bit of a misnomer--Absecon Island's first business was, for all intents and purposes, a bar.

In 1833, the New Jersey Gazeteer compiled an index of the resorts along the Jersey shore. Of the eight places listed--including Toms River, Tuckerton, and Somers Point, all of which advertised and took in guests for the season--only Cape May to the south and Long Branch to the north had boardinghouses dedicated exclusively to summer guests. Both of those towns were on the mainland, easily reachable by steamboat and stagecoach lines from Philadelphia and New York. Speculation about developing Absegami--or any of the other barrier islands dotting the one-hundred-plus miles of the Jersey shore line--was almost always met with skepticism about whether a roadbed could be built and maintained through the swampy meadows that separated the island from the mainland.

By 1850, there were seven houses on Absecon Island, and all but one belonged to descendants of Jeremiah Leeds. But the big bang creation moment of Atlantic City was just around the corner. Dr. Jonathan Pitney had been a resident of Absecon village on the mainland since 1820. He had represented Atlantic County at the state constitutional convention in 1844 and had run for Congress in 1848. For twenty-some years Pitney, who owned land on the island, had nursed a fantasy of building a railroad from Philadelphia to the coast with an eye toward developing the wilds of Absegami into a retreat for Philadelphians. He described the climate of the island as "salubrious" and imagined a "health resort" on its shores. The mainlanders dubbed his scheme "Pitney's Folly" and joked about the "railroad to nowhere." After writing a series of letters to Philadelphia newspapers, he assembled a group of landowners and manufacturers from south Jersey, including Samuel Richards, whose family was among the largest landowners in the eastern United States; Richards's holdings included a glassworks and fifty thousand acres in Camden County, which would have to be sliced in half by the railroad. Incidentally, Richards later admitted that when he first saw Absecon Island, he thought it was "the most horrible place to make the termination of a railroad" that he'd ever seen.

Pitney and his new partners enlisted the help of Richard Osborne, a nationally known civil engineer who was born in England and educated in Chicago, and had seen the power and wonder of towns booming in the West. He had also seen how easily fortunes could be carved out of virtually nothing simply by building a railroad. He predicted that "Pitney's Folly" would one day overtake Cape May as the nation's premier ocean resort. "The work worn artisan shut up in the close and debilitating shops of the city," he declared, "whose limited means prevents a long absence from his calling, will find here the rest and recreation that he cannot now obtain." Cape May--which was, believe it or not, America's first seashore resort--catered exclu...