Atlantic City, like Lourdes and Graceland, is a community based on faith. It is sustained by believers like Anna Zawicki, a street sultana taking her ease beneath the lavender awning of Bally's Park Place Casino Hotel, a giant grape Popsicle of a building at the midpoint of the world's most famous boardwalk. By her right side is a pair of stuffed raccoons; by her left, an airport luggage cart that holds her worldly possessions. Frank Sinatra croons to her from inside a boom box, and she accompanies him from time to time on a kazoo. "I like it here," she says. "It's better than Philadelphia, that's for sure. You can't make no money there."
Zawicki's belief in a cost-free route to fortune is what Atlantic City, in its newest incarnation, is all about. Shrine of the shill, hometown of hucksterism, municipal embodiment of the motto "Ocean, emotion and constant promotion," the city has reinvented itself time and time again for the sake of a new hustle. In 1936 its mayor claimed that the Miss America Pageant was a "cultural event." (True, a contestant in last week's pageant -- the 63rd -- did sing an aria from Die Fledermaus, but the event is still more about swimwear than opera.) During the Prohibition era, it was the East Coast Babylon for bootlegging, brothels and betting, but in 1946 Atlantic City tried to persuade the United Nations to settle there, citing its "historically noncontroversial background." In the late '50s the Chamber of Commerce campaigned to make local newspapers and radio stations refer to cloudy conditions at the resort as "partly sunny."
So when times got bad, it was not much of a stretch for this tired, neglected barker of a town to turn to casino gambling. The city that once made a paying exhibit out of premature babies and held a Miss International Nude competition would be doing what it always did best: separating its visitors from their dollars.
In 1976 casino promoters bought a television ad that showed $100 bills falling from the sky, and Atlantic City's voters were as mesmerized as if they had been tourists on the Boardwalk gawking at horses diving into pools and typewriters bigger than elephants. On the day in 1976 when the state referendum passed, they danced in the streets. Today Atlantic City has enough class to bring Cher, the queen of camp, back to the concert stage, enough savvy to have harvested $2.73 billion in the last year from bettors in its casinos, and enough allure to be the most popular destination in America. But the benefits of this resurrection have been unevenly shared. "This is a town noted for taking suckers," says Thomas Carver, president of the Casino Association of New Jersey. "But it's the biggest sucker of all."
Eleven years after the arrival of casinos, life in Atlantic City is paradoxical to the point of perversity. Thirty-three million people visit the city every year, and each day 1,300 tour buses clog the streets. But since 1976 the local population has shrunk 20%, to about 35,000, and residents continue to flee to the suburbs. There are 18,103 slot machines, but no car washes, no movie theaters and only one supermarket. And on Mother's Day, people could not get to church because the Tour de Trump, a bicycle race, blocked the roads that morning.