The Atlantic City Exhibit located at the Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall opened July 23, 2019. The exhibit was created through funding by the Casino Reinvestment and Development Authority (CRDA) and donations given to The Foundation of the Atlantic City Free Public Library.
Read more: About the Atlantic City Experience at Boardwalk Hall Exhibit
Long before Atlantic City was founded, the island where it would be developed, thick with woods and lined with dunes, was the summer home of the Lenni Lenape Indians, an Algonquian-speaking people. These original summer residents named the island Absegami, meaning "little water", a term for the bay denoting that the opposite shore was in sight. Over time the name was transformed into the present-day Absecon Island. Early colonial settlers in South Jersey largely ignored the island because it could only be reached by boat.
While the exact date of the first permanent settlement has never been determined, it is generally agreed that Jeremiah Leeds was the first to build and occupy a year-round residence on the island, building his home in 1783.
Dr. Jonathan Pitney moved to Absecon village to practice medicine and begins to promote the healing powers of the salt air and sea. He advocated for a health resort on the nearby Absecon Island.
Camden & Atlantic Company received a railroad charter. The first train to Atlantic City from Camden arrived on July 1, 1854.
The city was incorporated. "Atlantic City" name is selected by a civil engineer from Philadelphia, Richard Osborne, who prints it on a map of the city.
Absecon Lighthouse was first lit.
The first boardwalk was 1 mile long, 8 feet wide, and stood 1 foot above the sand. Designed to prevent sand from being carried into the hotel lobbies by the strollers’ long dresses and shoes, later boardwalks were more permanent. It later became an official Atlantic City street, Boardwalk.
The Easter Parade is held on the Boardwalk for the first time.
Salt water taffy is first sold.
Rolling chairs debuted on the Boardwalk.
The Atlantic City Beach Patrol began. Atlantic City had the first paid, professional lifeguards in the country.
Steel Pier opened as an amusement pier.
Martin Couney, an early advocate of neonatal care, starts an infant incubator exhibit on the Boardwalk, saving hundreds of tiny babies before it closed in 1943.
Atlantic City Free Public Library opened its doors and moves into a building funded by Andrew Carnegie.
The Atlantic City Aero Show lifted off for the first time, with the Wright Brothers and Glenn Curtiss flying high.
The first winner was 16-year-old Margaret Gorman, representing Washington, D.C.. She was awarded a Golden Mermaid statue.
Now known as Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall, Atlantic City Convention Hall was the largest auditorium in the world without columns or supports. U.S. Vice President Charles H. Curtis attended the dedication.
The hurricane destroyed more than half of the Boardwalk. Whole sections of the Boardwalk, with rails and benches still intact, were blown blocks inland.
Resorts International opens.
The City's first African American mayor, James L. Usry, is elected. He remained Mayor until July 2, 1990.
The new Atlantic City Convention Center opens near the end of the Atlantic City Expressway. It is one of the East Coast's largest convention centers.
The first shops at The Walk, a shopping and entertainment complex, open.
Atlantic City celebrates its 150th birthday.
The name "airport" was coined to designate Edward L. Bader Field, which opened in 1919. It was the oldest operational municipal airport in the country when it closed.
Superstorm Sandy comes ashore.
Four casinos close due to the economic downturn.
Municipal Stabalization and Recovery Act signed into law.
Atlantic City Boardwalk Hall renamed to James Whelan Boardwalk Hall
Stockton University returns to Atlantic City and opens a new campus.
COVID-19 Pandemic. State of New Jersey issues health directives.
A mammoth building like Boardwalk Hall needs an impressive musical instrument like the world’s largest musical instrument.
Known to the world as the largest pipe organ ever constructed, the Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall Pipe Organ took three years (1929-1932) to build and weighs over 150 tons. Built by Midmer-Losh, Inc., it cost between $450,000 and $500,000.
The official total number of pipes is 33,112 but the actual number is unknown. The number of pipes in the instrument's contract, when signed, was 29,524 but that figure rose as stops were added during construction to 32,205. An early description of the instrument mentions up to 33,111 pipes, and a thesis written on the pipe organ lists 32,928 – a figure that's probably attributable to City Organist Arthur Scott Brook. The Encyclopedia of the American Theatre Organ states 32,967 pipes. It’s safe to say there are more than 32,000 pipes.
The pipes are metal (lead, tin, or zinc) or wood (sugar pine or fir). The largest pipe is a diaphone pipe in a Dulzian reed stop, 64-feet long producing the CCCCC. It is 27”x27” square at the open end, the walls are 3” thick, made of sugar pine, and it weighs 3,350 pounds. It bends in an L-shape in order to fit in the chamber. The smallest pipe is 3/16 inch in diameter and 7 inches long and is made of lead or tin. From the mouth (speaking hole) of this pipe to the top is only ½ inch. Many of the pipes were made on-site in an organ shop set up for the project.
Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall also boasts another pipe organ in the Adrian Phillips Theater. This unique organ was built by W. W. Kimball to accompany silent films.
The organs are in the midst of a complete restoration. Many of the mechanisms flooded during the Hurricane of 1944 and the organ has not been fully functional since then. The Historic Organ Restoration Committee, a 501c3 founded to restore and preserve the organs, estimates that it will take $16 million to completely restore them.
Who designed the organs?
An Atlantic City native, Emerson Lewis Richards (1884 - 1963) designed organs as a hobby. Along with the Boardwalk Hall organs, he also designed the organ for Atlantic City High School in 1923. Additionally, he designed an organ that was in his private residence on the Boardwalk. His home and this organ were destroyed by a fire in 1958.
Professionally, Richards was an attorney. He also was a New Jersey State Assemblyman and Senator for various terms from 1912 to 1935. He also served as acting governor of New Jersey for several months in 1933. He served in the United States Army during World War I, at the same time that he was majority leader of the Senate.
A stroll on the Boardwalk and a day at the beach are hallmarks of a visit to Atlantic City, then and now.
Atlantic City was originally conceived of as a health resort. Visitors were encouraged to take the railroad from the congested cities to the seashore, breathe in the fresh air, and bathe in the salt water. Spending time at the beach was made safer with the Atlantic City Beach Patrol, on guard since 1892. Earlier bathers were watched by a constable of the police department.
As many of the early visitors did not own their own bathing suits, bath houses rented these and changing rooms. The earliest bathing suits worn in Atlantic City were full costumes - modesty and law dictated that the whole body be covered. For women, that meant wearing stockings until the 1920s; for men, shirts were required until at least 1940. Bathing suits, such as the ones on exhibit from the early 1930s, were often made of wool as the material repelled water and kept its shape better than cotton.
Overlooking the beach, the iconic Atlantic City Boardwalk was introduced as a way to keep sand from being tracked into the hotels’ lobbies. Several hoteliers and businessmen petitioned the city to construct a footwalk and the councilmembers approved $5,000. The walk - made of boards - opened to the public on June 26, 1870, and was eight feet wide, one mile long, and stood approximately one foot above the sand. This original boardwalk was removed and stored at the end of each year.
Later versions of the boardwalk were more permanent, with the last one constructed in 1896. It was designated as an official street in Atlantic City in 1895, and as a street name, Boardwalk is always capitalized when referring to the street in Atlantic City. The present-day Boardwalk is more than 4 miles long, 60 feet wide at its widest, and 12 feet above sea level at the highest point.
A walk along the wooden way or a ride in a rolling chair is a way to experience Atlantic City. The Absecon Lighthouse, first lit in 1857, while no longer right on the Boardwalk because of sand accretion, is the oldest structure in Atlantic City. The Boardwalk is lined with businesses and amusements and is the home to several piers. Atlantic City’s piers of the past and present are:
Where’s your beach?
Residents and visitors to Atlantic City frequently have a “favorite” spot on the sand. Whether it be convenience or comfort, people return year after year to a particular beach.
While Atlantic City’s beaches are free to all and open to anyone, in the first half of the twentieth century, this was not the case. In the 1920s, Boardwalk hotel owners complained to the City government that their guests did not want to share the beaches in front of their hotels with African American bathers. With Convention Hall under construction - and a large beach in front of it - the Missouri Avenue beach was designated as the segregated beach.
Designated Chicken Bone Beach by the locals, the name came from the practice of bringing picnics to the beach with fried chicken. This beach was a popular haunt of nationally-known figures, such as Sammy Davis, Jr., Martin Luther King, Jr., Billie Holliday, Sarah Vaughn, and others, often during their visits for concerts and conventions.
This display has been archived as of July 2022 and is no longer on display at the exhibit.
This display has been archived as of July 2022 and is not on display at the exhibit!
HBO presented the show on TV from 2010 to 2014. It was loosely based on the book, Boardwalk Empire, by Nelson Johnson, about the Prohibition era in Atlantic City.
Nucky Who?
Enoch Lewis "Nucky" Johnson was an Atlantic City political boss and racketeer who unofficially ran the Republican political machine that controlled Atlantic City and Atlantic County from the 1910s to the late 1930s. Born in 1883 in Smithville, New Jersey, "Nucky" (a nickname derived from his first name) was allegedly involved in promoting bootlegging during Prohibition, illegal gambling activities and prostitution.
In the HBO series, Nucky - played by actor Steve Buscemi - is named Nucky Thompson. The name was changed to reflect that the character was only loosely based on the real-life man.
The 1920s in Atlantic City
What were Americans doing in the 1920s? Dancing the Charleston, listening to jazz, and watching Rudolph Valentino at the movies. In spite of Prohibition, which made it illegal to make or sell liquor (including beer and wine), Americans drank anyway, going to secret clubs (or speakeasies) or making "bathtub gin" at home.
The unique new musical form called jazz was so important to the 1920s that the period is sometimes called the Jazz Age. Jazz served as the background music for this period, playing in nightclubs, on Broadway, as well as at private parties, and it drew New Yorkers to Harlem, the heart of African American culture during the 1920s.
Like jazz music, motion pictures were also more widely accepted during the 1920s as they moved out of working-class storefront nickelodeons into impressive movie palaces which attracted a more middle-class audience. In addition, the movies themselves illustrated the values of modern America at the same time as it reinforced traditional middle-class values.
The society of the 1920s was at odds with itself; people of the older generations and the middle class still clung to the Puritan ethic, while the younger generation had vastly different attitudes and morals. Young women rebelled against the previous generation, cutting their hair short and shortening their hemlines and wearing makeup. Decadent party goers, both the flappers, and their male counterparts, the flaming youth, demanded access to the alcohol that was accessible to the very well connected, and thus the demand for alcohol, which had never really disappeared, instead increased.
In Atlantic City, during Prohibition, the power of Atlantic City’s boss, Enoch “Nucky” Johnson’s reached its zenith. Prohibition was effectively unenforced in Atlantic City, and, as a result, the resort's popularity grew further. The city called itself “The World's Play Ground.” Most of Johnson’s income came from the percentage he took on every gallon of illegal liquor sold, and on his gambling and prostitution operations in Atlantic City. Johnson was quoted as saying:
"We have whiskey, wine, women, song and slot machines. I won’t deny it and I won’t apologize for it. If the majority of the people didn’t want them they wouldn’t be profitable and they wouldn’t exist. The fact that they do exist proves to me that the people want them.”
Nucky’s Empire
What would you have seen if you walked the streets of Atlantic City in the 1920s?
Read more: Boardwalk Empire: Fact and Fiction in the Roaring Twenties
Please note that this exhibit is open to the public weekdays from 9 AM to 5 PM but The Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall that controls access to the exhibit will occasionally close the exhibit areas for special events and Boardwalk Hall events. Please check the Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall Events Schedule before planning your visit.