DownWithTyranny!: Speaking of Atlantic City, we have a bit of "fact-checking" of the "Boardwalk Empire" image

The original trailer for Louis Malle's Atlantic City

by Ken

Okay, so we weren't actually speaking of Atlantic City, but we were not so long ago when I wrote about HBO's Boardwalk Empire. I'm still enjoying the dickens out of the show, but in the interest of fairness, I thought I should note that The New Yorker's excellent "Talk of the Town" reporter Ben McGrath has a lovely, er, counter-take -- printed under the standing head "FACT-CHECKING DEPT." in the Nov. 22 issue -- from an authority of sorts on Atlantic City. I was going to cherry-pick the piece, but I don't think that would be fair to McGrath. So here's his report:

FACT-CHECKING DEPT.
ANOTHER JERSEY SHORE
by Ben McGrath

In Atlantic City last summer, Bryant Simon, a Temple University history professor, was ticketed for running a red light—on foot. “I think you can get a ticket for anything here,” he said the other day. “This is notoriously a shakedown town.” Simon, who grew up in South Jersey and spent summers hanging around the Atlantic City boardwalk, was riding shotgun in a rusty Honda Civic, which he deemed “theft-proof,” and directing his driver on a tour of his old haunts. First stop: Enoch (Nucky) Johnson’s house, a modest, wood-panelled structure “downbeach,” in Ventnor. Johnson, the Prohibition-era political boss, is the model for Steve Buscemi’s character in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” which has been a boon for the local talking-heads business. The house once doubled as a speakeasy and is across the street from Simon’s family’s place. “My sense is that he was nowhere near as vicious as the show makes him out to be,” Simon said.

Having watched a number of episodes, Simon has some quibbles: the show’s bungalow colony where Buscemi’s Irish love interest lives (“The housing stock here is like what you’d find in Philly or West Baltimore, all two stories or more”), the sight of white people pushing the famous rolling wicker chairs along the boardwalk. (“Even in the films made back in the period, the black guy pushing it is like a character out of ‘Gone with the Wind,’ ” he said.)

The car stopped at a red light on Atlantic Avenue. “To me, the best representation of Atlantic City, better than ‘Boardwalk Empire,’ is ‘Atlantic City,’ the Louis Malle film,” Simon said, and pointed ahead at a Flemish-style inn called the Knife and Fork. “That’s where Burt Lancaster takes Susan Sarandon on the date when he wants to impress her. They still serve, I think, lobster thermidor.” The light turned green, and Simon gestured to a park on his left. He said, “This is a very interesting Civil War memorial right here, despite the fact that Atlantic City barely existed during the Civil War.” Before long, he was riding through the city’s largest historically black neighborhood. “It’s called the Northside, even though it’s west,” he said. “Now you can see really bombed-out Atlantic City.”

Toward the northern end of the boardwalk, near an unfinished high-rise known as the Revel, Simon got out of the car and ducked into the Atlantic City Historical Museum, where a dozen mostly elderly people were seated and watching a video called “Boardwalk Ballyhoo” in the corner of the exhibition space. “This is very typical,” he said. “There’s no one young here, ever.” The video showed scenes from early Miss America pageants, boxing cats, and diving horses.

Out on the boardwalk, Simon noted that the benches face in, toward the parade of pedestrians, instead of out, overlooking the ocean, as in the television show. “I find this other story more compelling: the boardwalk as this stage where people came to announce they had made it in America,” he explained. On this day, a large number of bearded people had come in search of tickets to a Phish concert that evening at the old convention hall. “Archie Bunker came here for his second honeymoon—it was his kind of town,” Simon said, marvelling at the Phish fans. In the sixties, he said, “there was a real attempt to keep hippies from coming.”

Ahead in the distance was the old Ritz-Carlton, which has gone condo. Nucky Johnson kept an office there, occupying an entire floor. Simon went in, and was looking at old photographs on the walls when a woman approached. “Hello, were you looking to see someone in real estate?” she asked, with a smoker’s rasp. The woman and her husband, it turned out, moved to the building seven years ago, from Levittown, Pennsylvania, after they realized that they’d been making monthly pilgrimages to the casinos. “We never dreamed of living at the shore,” she said. “It’s a wonderful life. It really is.”