Boardwalk. St. Charles Place. Atlantic Avenue. If you grew up playing Monopoly, you’ll be familiar with these place names. While they may sound like they’re from a generic U.S. city, dreamt up by the game’s inventor, they exist in real life—in Atlantic City, New Jersey. But they are no longer what they once were.
Today Atlantic City has a reputation as a destination for coach-loads of seniors looking to spend a day at the slots. But when Parker Brothers first produced Monopoly in 1935 it was one of the most luxurious and famous resorts in America. Grand hotels, saloons, dance halls and theaters stretched along the Atlantic Ocean for seven miles. The casinos were still 40 years away, but cocktails flowed for over half-a-million pleasure-seekers every year.
Part of Atlantic City’s appeal was in being open to everyone; from the well-heeled promenading down the Million Dollar Pier, lit by Thomas Edison, to the bawdier pubs and bordellos along the backstreets. “Businessmen learned quickly,” wrote Nelson Johnson in Boardwalk Empire, “working-class tourists had money to spend, too. What they lacked in sophistication they made up for in numbers.”
One of the last traces of old Atlantic City is the Claridge Hotel. Found on the corner of the two most expensive properties on the Monopoly board—Park Place and Boardwalk—the Claridge was known in its heyday as the “skyscraper by the sea.” Opened in 1930, it had an Art Deco opulence that wouldn’t be out of place in midtown Manhattan.
Stepping outside though, you are very quickly confronted with the grim air of the new Atlantic City.
Running alongside the hotel is Indiana Avenue, one of the highly desirable “reds” in Monopoly. It was once home to the iconic Sands Casino, whose Copa Room had been graced by Frank Sinatra. Bankrupt and demolished in 2006, it was repurposed into Artlantic, a public art project hoping to revitalize the beachfront after Hurricane Sandy. The project failed, and, like much of Atlantic City, was torn down.
When playing Monopoly, there’s nothing quite as pleasurable as having your opponent land on one of your properties filled with houses or hotels, then squeezing them ever closer to bankruptcy while watching your cash roll in. According to Parker Brothers, Monopoly was created by Charles Darrow, a heating engineer from Pennsylvania, put out of work by the Great Depression. “It was the game’s exciting promise of fame and fortune,” the rules explain, “that initially prompted Darrow to produce this game.”