While the boardwalk hotels catered to white visitors and enforced strict segregation through most of the 20th century, Black performers and tourists created their own parallel resort culture on Kentucky and Indiana Avenues in the Northside. From the 1920s through the 1960s, this was one of the great jazz and R&B circuits on the East Coast. Every major Black entertainer of the era — Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr, James Brown — performed here, often in the same weeks they were forbidden to stay at the hotels where they headlined on the boardwalk.
The key venues — Club Harlem at 32 North Kentucky Avenue, Grace's Little Belmont, Wonder Gardens — are long gone, but the street grid survives and the history is increasingly documented. The neighbourhood today is one of the poorer parts of Atlantic City and has little of the visible grandeur of the casino district, but for anyone interested in the deeper history of the resort, it's the most significant part of the city.