(2 of 8)
The police-department budget has tripled to $24 million since 1976, but the crime rate is now the highest in the state. Atlantic City has 7,472 casino hotel rooms, but its housing stock is down by about 15% since 1980. The casinos have created 41,000 new jobs -- more than the city's population -- but the welfare rolls are up, and the number of overnight guests at the Rescue Mission has swollen from an average of 25 in 1976 to 220 today.
The city once called itself "the lungs of Philadelphia," but residents now say that the exhaust fumes from tour buses make the air unbreathable. Thanks to tax revenues from the casinos (more than 63% of the $130 million raised annually), local property owners are assessed less for public education than in most other parts of the state. But the school superintendent has been fighting for years with a casino over the purchase price of a parcel of land needed to replace a leaky 65-year-old high school.
All too often Atlantic City looks like a sneering caricature of untrammeled capitalism. (This may explain why terrorists threatening to retaliate against the U.S. on the third anniversary of the American bombing of Libya were rumored to have chosen Atlantic City as their target.) Along the Boardwalk stands a rank of casinos nudged so close against the water that they seem to teeter at its edge, their windows shut to the ocean air, their backs turned to the city. Behind them cowers the neighborhood known as the Inlet, where boxy row houses devolve into strange confections of brick, plywood and cardboard, and people doze on sleeping bags in doorless rooms with broken windows.
Except for the barking of stray dogs, the Inlet is a quiet neighborhood, not because of its tranquillity but because of its gaps -- vacant lots where houses were razed and replaced by fields of pink clover, Queen Anne's lace and beer-bottle shards. Here and there are anachronistic gestures to elegance -- carved laurels in a window casement, a Victorian turret, delicate porch columns -- that lend the scene the haunted air of a horror-movie set. At times the Inlet seems just a bad joke. Standing over one bunker-style housing & project is a billboard touting one of developer Donald Trump's two casinos: TRUMP CASTLE. WHERE BETTER IS NOT ENOUGH. Just beyond the corner, in the distance, pokes the upswept prow of Trump's 282-ft. yacht, the Trump Princess, at which local kids like to throw rocks. Even Al Glasgow, who has knocked around Atlantic City for 18 years and now publishes a newsletter on casinos, finds the picture cataclysmic. "It's not the end of the world, but you can almost see it from here," he says.
For turning Atlantic City into an American monument to self-delusion, the casinos blame the town, the town blames the casinos, and everyone blames the state. All of them are right.