IT’S BEEN OVER A YEAR since my last trip to Sin City, which featured high-stakes blackjack, Wayne Newton, and a bachelor party for a friend who later broke off his engagement (what a deal for him!). But it’s been an even longer spell since my last visit to that shining city by the sea known as Atlantic City. Not that it’s far–from Washington, DC, it is only a three-and-a-half hour drive. Having grown up on the Jersey shore, I lived
only an hour north of the action–or at least what my friends and I thought was action until we hit Las Vegas. Suddenly, Atlantic City looked like the county fair and Vegas was DisneyWorld. The casinos were larger and more decadent, and yet the table minimums were a lot lower. (You can still play $1 blackjack and craps at some casinos in Vegas; the minimums in Atlantic City are mostly $10.) As far as attractions go, there isn’t much of a comparison. There’s no Siegfried and Roy or Celine Dion in AC. (On this trip I did see a billboard for Huey Lewis and the News.) It’s only claim to fame is the boardwalk–thinly sliced pizza, saltwater taffy, Kohr Brothers’ frozen custard, and that armless woman who played the organ with her tongue. Atlantic City’s key advantage is proximity to cities like New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. As David Johnston of the Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out, after the first Jersey casino (Resorts International) opened in 1978, “suddenly one in four Americans lived within a six-hour drive of a blackjack table.”

It’s important to remember how and why casinos came to Atlantic City in the first place. As Sally Denton and Roger Morris explain in “The Money and the Power,” the victory of the gambling lobby in a 1976 referendum “was the capstone of what one writer described as decades of political agitation and pressure by organized crime families in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, who expected, as in Las Vegas, not only a take from the casinos, but to dominate all the collateral business from construction, transportation, food, liquor, entertainment, and every other service.”