A.C. concert sizzles on the beach

When the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority kicked in $1.2 million to underwrite Sunday's Maroon 5 concert, part of the plan was to woo visitors such as Mary Jo Olszyk. She doesn't like to gamble, but she does like to vacation at the beach - making her a perfect potential customer for a town desperate to diversify from what has been its gaming mainstay.

"It wouldn't be my first place to come," she said. "It's my impression that it's dirtier than the other Shore areas - the water and the town."

Even so, there she was at the registration desk at the Claridge Hotel, waiting to check in, having driven all the way from outside Wilkes-Barre to see the concert. She was one of more than 50,000 people who bought a ticket. "I'm here for Adam Levine," Maroon 5's hunky lead singer, she said.

The concert, with Maroon 5, and opening acts Nick Jonas and Matt McAndrew, demonstrates "that we're still the party capital of New Jersey," even minus four casinos, said Atlantic City's ebullient mayor, Don Guardian. "You can't find a room in town, all the way up to Pleasantville."

He said the hotels are sold out through the week until Thursday's concert starring Rascal Flatts.

With the sun hot on the sand, a convivial crowd nicely beered-up on beach blankets, and a breeze off the ocean, selling Olszyk on Atlantic City shouldn't be too hard. And, no matter where she spends her money in the future, she's spending it Sunday and Monday in Atlantic City, "several hundred dollars," she estimates, part of the $24 million that Jeff Guaracino, executive director of the Atlantic City Alliance, projects the event will add to this beleaguered city's economy.

"It's designed to drive tourism for visitors who are not gamblers," Guaracino said. He said that the Authority couldn't afford to fund a free concert this year and turned to LiveNation to invest in the show. Guaracino said LiveNation agreed to fund two concerts on days other than Friday and Saturday to drive hotel business.

Police said there were a handful of medical calls for heat exhaustion, but no major problems or arrests.

This time last year, four of Atlantic City's casinos were in their death throes and 8,500 people were in the process of losing their jobs. Something big had to be done to put Atlantic City on the map for something other than heartache. The Authority kicked in $3.5 million to fund two free mega-concerts on the beach, drawing more than 50,000 people to see country music stars Blake Shelton and Lady Antebellum.

That's why this year's concert is particularly meaningful to Tina Condos, 53, a cocktail waitress at the Trump Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal is now in the middle of a tough labor dispute, with its workers struggling to hang on to what remains of what used to be middle-class wages and benefits.

"People don't realize that Atlantic City is going down, on the edge," said Condos, pushing away a beer as Levine belted out "Love Somebody." To Condos, who raised four children on her salary from the casinos, the concert means "we are revitalizing our city. We don't see bad things happening. We need more things like this."

Santoro said her hotel is sold out, and would have been anyway. The concert allowed her to boost room rates. So while it's good for this week, she said, what worries her are the pending possible cuts from Trenton that would remove funding from the Authority and cut financing from Guaracino's Atlantic City Alliance.

Santoro credits the Alliance's citywide leisure tourism marketing campaign, DO|AC, with increasing traffic to her hotel. Revenues dropped when the campaign ended. "We cannot put our heads in the sand," she said, and not market the city as a whole.

But all this was a world away from the happy crowd on the beach, waving their hands and singing "This love is taking its toll on me." Amid their joyous crooning, the long wait on the Boardwalk to get in to the concert was forgotten, as was the circling for parking.

None of that mattered to Samech Abrams and her husband, Damien, of Germantown, who parked themselves on the beach at 8 a.m. to get as close to the front as they could on the cheapest possible ticket - $40. They took a 5:35 a.m. train out of Philadelphia.

Levine "is my second husband," she said, as her actual husband laughed. He was one of the many male concertgoers indulging their wives' and girlfriends' obsession with the tattooed star.

All's fair in love and music, he said: "I've got my second wives, too."

215-854-2769

@JaneVonBergen

Inquirer staff writer Suzette Parmley contributed to this article.