Boardwalk casinos prosper but neighbors don't
By John Curran
Associated Press
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — Nearly 25 years after this city's revitalization began with the opening of a Resorts International casino, there are still neighborhoods where prosperity is but a rumor.
Associated Press
Along the Boardwalk, business booms in many of the city's 12 casinos, but dozens of Atlantic Avenue shops and restaurants have never hit the jackpot they expected from casino-bound customers. For them, the decay of this seaside resort hasn't gone away.
In Atlantic City, business booms in many of the 12 casinos, but dozens of neighboring shops and restaurants have never hit the jackpot. Legislation in the 1970s required that casinos have at least 500 hotel rooms and corresponding amounts of convention space, restaurants and retail stores, so many gamblers don't venture beyond the premises.
Still, many people credit casino gambling with remaking Atlantic City, although they also acknowledge that mistakes were made.
"Did it work? Yes, it worked," said Carl Zeitz, a former member of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission. "It delivered on the promises and I was a skeptic. All the horribles were true. But, yes, it worked."
In a Nov. 2, 1976, referendum, New Jersey voters agreed to let Atlantic City have casinos.
Resorts International opened May 26, 1978, with long waits for people to even enter the building and gamblers standing three- and four-deep at the craps tables. From that start grew an industry that now employs more than 46,000 people and wins $4.2 billion a year from gamblers.
But in other ways, casinos crapped out. They were brought in to reverse the city's deteriorating Boardwalk hotels and ramshackle neighborhoods, but progress was slow in many ways.
In retrospect, regulators and casino executives here blame the original casino legislation, which required that casinos have at least 500 hotel rooms and corresponding amounts of convention space, restaurants and retail stores.
The amenities paid off for the casinos. But they hurt Atlantic City businesses, which were left out as gamblers ate, shopped and attended concerts inside the casino buildings.
There were about 100 full-service restaurants in the city when casinos began to open. Now, there are 14, according to Mayor Lorenzo Langford.
"We kind of shot ourselves in the foot when we created the legislation that casinos would be all-encompassing, self-contained," said Langford, a former casino dealer. "The city's business district was destroyed because people had no reason to leave the casinos."
About 25 percent of Atlantic City's residents still live at or below the poverty line, Langford said.
But casino taxes have helped build an $83 million high school, a minor league baseball stadium, a bus station and dozens of housing developments.
More taxes are due from a $1 billion casino named The Borgata, planned for a July 2003 opening.
Many officials credit the success of the casino venture to a regulatory code aimed at keeping gamblers in and mobsters out.
The code helped New Jersey acquire a reputation as having the most effective casino regulatory structure in the world. It required intensive background checks on everyone from chambermaids to CEOs, looking for financial problems, criminal records or any other blemish in their personal history.
It also required background checks for vendors and suppliers, under the theory that if organized crime was going to infiltrate casinos, it would try to do so first by doing business with them.
The ultra-strict regulation, which has successfully kept Atlantic City casinos free of mob taint, has made New Jersey's regulatory system a model for other states.
