| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America. By Bryant Simon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. vii plus 285pp.).

Temple University historian Bryant Simon opens with the story of Jordan Sayles, an African American who for years pushed white people in rolling chairs along the Boardwalk. The white visitors defined—in the manner of David Nasaw's Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (1993)—as middle class, by their exclusion of blacks, provided work for Sayles and thousands like him, while enjoying the feeling of being rich enough "even to afford to pay someone else to carry [them] from place to place." (p. 7) Bank tellers, salesmen, and carpenters basked in the dazzle of Atlantic City hotels and movie palaces. Simon sees Atlantic City as a precursor of Disneyland's appeal to white middle-class aspiration and exclusion. From its origins as a commercial venture to bring Philadelphians by train to the sea in 1854 through its development of the boardwalk, the Mediterranean-themed Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel, and the Steel Pier with its diving horse and incubator babies, he shows how Atlantic City found a niche in the middle—between Coney Island and more upscale resort towns.

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