A tale of two Atlantic Cities

Gov. Christie has proposed creating a protected, high-class, high-roller ghetto for the casino industry in Atlantic City. This would perpetuate the problem that brought the city to its present low estate.

Christie ignores - as everyone has for three decades - that other ghetto, made up of poor people who could not afford to move out of Atlantic City. This other ghetto has prevented the city from becoming what many hoped for in 1980: the Las Vegas of the East.

In 1980, some of us understood what Las Vegas knew well: Casinos don't work without an attractive non-gambling milieu. In 1979, when I sold the Marlborough Blenheim Hotel at Boardwalk and Park Place to Bally's, the idea was that gambling money would be used to make the entire city - from Maine Avenue to Jackson Avenue - the "Playground of the World," as it was once billed.

Alas, Bally's and the other casino companies had no grasp of the little community's rare long-term opportunity. They saw only the casino industry's short-term opportunity. And they grabbed it to the exclusion of considerations that would have benefitted the entire city.

The casino people turned their backs on the ramshackle streets and alleys just off the Boardwalk, and Christie's proposal would set in stone this deadly division of the two ghettos. The wall he's building would guarantee the permanence of the city's ugly side.

The concept that could have worked in 1980 was redevelopment of the entire city as a gambling, sports, entertainment, and family complex, which could have survived inevitable competition from other states. What Atlantic City needed was a bulldozer six blocks wide to convert the slums into open spaces and an unassailable entertainment destination: Disneyland with casinos.

Much like Las Vegas, the vision of casinos embedded in a complex of golf courses, riding trails, campsites, and entertainment venues couldn't be easily copied. Cars would be banned, and old-fashioned, environmentally friendly electric trolleys would wind gently through the area. The absence of streets and parking lots would have increased the developable area by 30 percent.

As with Disneyland, those who worked there wouldn't live there. This would have meant moving the residential population - at that time only a few thousand households - into better living conditions 10 minutes outside the city.

Rich and middle-income people had long ago left Atlantic City, leaving those without the resources and ability to pull themselves out of the mire. The tens of thousands of casino employees hired since have already chosen not to live in the city. For the most part, they opted to live elsewhere, taking with them their taxes and spending. And the entire retail industry moved with the fleeing middle class, deepening the desperate poverty of those who remained.

Christie should have declared the entire town a protected redevelopment zone. Instead, he proposes protecting only the rich casino owners while allowing the rest of the city to fester and rot.

Atlantic City must offer what casinos in other places cannot. Instead, Christie offers only what has been proven not to work. For the second time in a generation, Atlantic City has missed the boat.