By the time I was growing up there, in the nineties, little remained of the glamorous place my grandparents remembered. In 1976, New Jersey passed a bill that legalized casino gambling in Atlantic City, which helped, but not enough. If you wanted fun, you could fly to Las Vegas if you wanted a breeze, you could crank up the air-conditioning. By the nineteen-seventies, though, Atlantic City had lost its purpose. Through the early nineteen-sixties, it was the Eastern seaboard’s go-to summer resort: a short train ride from New York City and Philadelphia, the town offered affordable entertainment for everyone. Atlantic City was in the right place at the right time. Vacations were once a privilege for the wealthiest, but by the turn of the century cheaper and faster railroads opened up tourism to the middle class. ![]() When Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption,” in 1899, Americans already loved to travel.
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