Atlantic City is a seaside resort on the New Jersey shore, about 90 minutes south-east of Philadelphia, built on a flat sandy barrier island that gives the place its famously long boardwalk — at six kilometres the oldest, and until fairly recently the most famous, wooden boardwalk in the world. The city was laid out in 1854 as a weekend escape for the factory workers of Philadelphia, and for a century it was the single biggest summer destination on the east coast. When jet travel opened up Florida and the Caribbean in the 1960s the resort went into a steep decline, and in 1976 New Jersey voters legalised casino gambling here in the hope of reviving it. It half worked. The casinos rebuilt the skyline, the boardwalk and the beach were restored, and Atlantic City had a second life — but the opening of casinos in Pennsylvania and New York in the 2000s cut its customer base in half, several of the big resorts have closed, and today the place has the melancholic air of an empire past its peak.
For all that, it is still a strange and entertaining place to visit. The boardwalk is the thing — built in 1870, lined on one side with Victorian-era saltwater taffy stands, amusement arcades, and rolling chairs, and on the other with the enormous casino towers of Borgata, Hard Rock, Tropicana, Caesars and the rest. The beach is broad, clean, and free of charge (rare on the New Jersey shore). The Steel Pier, rebuilt in 1993, has a Ferris wheel and carnival rides projecting out over the Atlantic. And at the north end of the boardwalk, the Absecon Lighthouse (1857) is still the tallest in New Jersey and a reminder of what the resort used to look like before the casinos arrived. Just down the coast in Margate, Lucy the Elephant — a 20-metre wooden elephant-shaped building from 1881, the oldest remaining roadside attraction in America — is worth the short drive.
Beyond gambling, the Monopoly board also lives here: the American version of the game was designed in the 1930s using Atlantic City street names, which is why anyone who's played it will find themselves wandering past Baltic, Marvin Gardens, Park Place and Boardwalk with a sense of déjà vu.