The morning after Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey, television networks broadcast startling images of the Atlantic City Boardwalk. It appeared to be shredded to pieces. Pylons stuck out of the water. Chunks of wood had been swept inland and deposited on city streets.
"One of the most famous landmarks in the country, so much of it destroyed," intoned George Stephanopoulos on ABC.
It was terrible news for Atlantic City tourism. It was also entirely misleading, as I learned during a visit this weekend.
The footage was real, but was from the section of the Boardwalk that runs along Absecon Inlet, fronting a residential neighborhood that did suffer severe damage. But the legendary promenade, lined with casinos and palm readers and carnival games and stores selling saltwater taffy and funnel cakes cheese fries, was barely damaged at all. That should have come as a relief to gamblers, not mention anyone needing a T-shirt that reads "I love purses, shoes, jewelry and men."
ABC later corrected the online text version of its report. Still, the public relations damage had been done. So when the city struck back with a flood of "we're open for business" dispatches, I decided to take a day trip to see for myself, booking a seat on Greyhound's "Lucky Streak" bus service from Port Authority ($38 round trip, including fees). I was due to leave at 8:30 a.m. for to Bally's casino, with a return trip at 7 p.m.
Greyhound is one of many companies that run between New York and Atlantic City – about a two-and-a-half-hour trip — and turned out to be the wrong choice. The company had pared back its service because of reduced post-storm demand, but had not bothered to adjust its online ticketing service, so neither of the two buses I had reserved the night before actually existed. (After my trip, a company spokesman told me the problem would be rectified. "It's not our policy to allow tickets to be purchased for a schedule that's not in service," he said.)
So I took a later bus, but arrived just in time to catch several hundred Atlantic City boosters in yellow T-shirts marching down the gloriously sunny Boardwalk, trying to get the word out that the city was open for business. Led by Elvis and Michael Jackson impersonators, they included a colorful crop of characters, including a ventriloquist in Uncle Sam gear and a group of four women who ditched the demonstration almost as soon as the march started to buy rum and cokes. "It's Atlantic City," one told me. "You can do whatever you want."
I dropped out too, though with a loftier goal: to scout out the work in progress that is Artlantic, a five-year public art project in large part filling vacant lots along the Boardwalk with public art. One site I viewed from behind fences was a lot of undulated terraces housing a half-buried pirate ship – part art, part playground – and illuminated words by the artist Robert Barry, placed around the seven-acre space. The sites were mostly spared by the storm, and work continues; the first phase will open to the public in 2013.
From there I went to visit two of the few Atlantic City attractions not on the Boardwalk. First was the local Tanger Outlets, a surprisingly vast outlet mall woven into the city blocks just behind Bally's. I window-shopped, but held off on buying anything, given my limited budget (more on that later). I then headed three blocks inland to the White House Sub Shop, at the corner of Mississippi and Arctic Avenues, a tiny corner store that serves up meatball subs, cheese steaks and their loaded Italian special of cappicola, salami, ham and provolone doused with chopped hot peppers.
It was closed, but a scribbled sign — "Sandy did us in" — directed customers to the its other branch, on "Spice Road," a restaurant row within the Taj Mahal complex. I found it packed – though it was surrounded by almost deserted more generic spots like Sbarro and Panda Express – and ordered the Italian special for $7.25.
That was slightly pricier than what it costs at the corner store – "we've got to pay the rent," the cashier said – but I was not concerned. When I set my budget for the trip, I had used the same techniques members of Congress use to create their budget plans. I simply projected large gambling winnings and put the total cost of the trip at $0.
Not really. I am neither a gambler nor a Congressman. I do, however, like to wander casinos and study the intense faces of the men and women crowded around poker and baccarat tables, always an interesting contrast to the nonchalance of the dealers. (That's one reason for New Yorkers to come to Atlantic City instead of Resorts World, the new casino in Queens, which has no live dealers.)
But I did want to get in the spirit of things, and as long as I was already in the Taj Mahal, I decided to blow a little money there. So I looked for games where my lack of skill would do the least damage — namely, roulette. But the open tables all had $15 minimum bets, too pricey for me. (I had allotted a whopping $20 for gambling.) So I headed straight for the slots, skipping ones with names like Kitty Glitter and Unicorn Dreaming for simpler machines with bars and 7's. I walked off half an hour later with a $60 profit.
Instead of risking my winnings on four roulette chips, I gave in to my personal vice: sugar. Saltwater taffy originated in Atlantic City, and it remains a popular item. If you want to try one piece of every flavor – from peach to molasses mint – at the Fralinger's store on the Boardwalk, it will cost you about $2.74, at $7.99 a pound.
So, yes, Atlantic City is open for business. But clues abounded that not all was well. There was the closed sub shop, for example. And when I had picked up the Sunday Press of Atlantic City on my way back from there, the cover feature profiled five families in the region whose homes were destroyed or damaged. A woman working in the taffy shop spoke of cars ruined, bottom floors flooded and waterlogged belongings lining the curves.
I walked out to the end of the surviving Boardwalk – not far past the Revel, the huge glass-encased resort that houses Atlantic City's newest casino – where crime scene tape and sawhorses blocked pedestrians from going any further. Beyond it, just like the images on TV, the Boardwalk was in tatters. It was another world: sand had invaded the streets, and I found a team of volunteer workers in from Georgia who had no idea the casinos were still open.
A multigenerational group of men speaking Spanish drank beers near a damaged playground; some had grown up fishing off the Boardwalk. They pointed me a bit farther north, where piles of trash bags and waterlogged furniture lined the sidewalks outside homes and many garage windows and doors were still covered in plywood. I noticed that at least some of the wood had been recycled: scribbled on one square of wood that covered a garage someone had written – apparently over a year ago – "Stay Away Irene."
I knew that it was out this way that one of Atlantic City's best-known non-Boardwalk restaurants, Kelsey and Kim's Southern Cafe, was located, and went to see if it had suffered damage. I found the restaurant operating at full tilt, already full for supper at 5 p.m. I joined the crowds, ordering tangy pork ribs with salad, collard greens and candied yams ($15.99). As I was eating, a manager named Stephanie told me that though the restaurant had suffered no damage, her own house had not been so lucky. Flying debris had opened a wide hole in her siding and soaked the upper floors. A crew was working on it as we spoke, she said. It was Sunday after dark: the casinos may be having trouble attracting customers, but construction crews were clearly working overtime.
A $10 taxi took me back downtown, and I told the driver to stop at the outlets, where I decided to dedicate a big portion of my winnings on a $38.99 Banana Republic sweater I had spotted on my first pass through the outlets earlier in the day and before my slot machine success.
Back at Bally's, I learned there was no 7 p.m. bus, and headed to the Tropicana to gnaw on leftover saltwater taffy and wait for the 8 o'clock, feeling bloated but happy that my spending might have contributed just a tiny bit to the recovery of the city.
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