Atlantic City: The Slow Decline Of An American Dream
Now, I had been warned before I left, but the pull of peeling glamour can be very strong indeed. Atlantic City was once everything that Las Vegas is today, a getaway of excess where holidaying tourists could make or – more likely – break themselves, a resort of hucksters and chancers, a playground for the mildly deranged and the hopelessly optimistic. The glitter and the seedy underbelly of the American dream rolled into one. First of all, though, came a seemingly endless train journey, sitting on a spartan carriage, staring listlessly out of the window at the less than salubrious views of South Jersey after the crossing the broad, sweeping splendour of the Deleware River. Seldom have I seen a greater contrast in such a short period of time as I have between the art deco magnificence of Philadephia's 30th Street Station and the fading suburbs of Cherry Hill and Pennsauken. The train moved at a glacial pace through these little towns before picking up speed as we moved through woods and countryside before the ocean started to peep into view.
The slow decline of Atlantic City is the first thing that you see as you exit the railway station. Trump Plaza was the folly of world renowned quasi-human Donald Trump. Lavishly built, with the presumed impression of sticking two fingers up at the rest of the town, it faltered through two bankruptcies before finally closing in September 2025, recently enough for the imprint of his failed venture to still be visible on the outside of the now-vacant building that sits in plain view as you leave the station. It's a curiously pleasing sight, albeit one tempered by the knowledge that Trump himself will have suffered little personally from its closure.
You come, of course, for the boardwalk made famous again by Steve Buscemi's recent televised attempts to build an empire there, but the gambling overlords of the city don't really want tourists walking its length, taking in the bracing gusts of the adjacent ocean and, most specifically, not spending their money in their dens of inequity. So it is that to get there requires a degree of negotiation, through brightly lit plazas with the sun reflecting on the sea like a suggestive wink in the distance. We eventually emerged at the top of a pier that didn't even stretch into the ocean, looking down on the herringbone patterned boardwalk and wondering whether it may be an optical illusion. Even when finally at ground level, the beach and the sea remain hidden behind shuttered amusements. Small wonder that, judging by the paucity of footprints in the sand, so few people seem to have taken the opportunity to sample the breathtaking magnificence of
