If you dont know who Reese Palley is, then, you need to do your research! Do A.C? It needs to be undone, says a guy who got it right from the beginning (Mulshine) The Revel: Just the latest in a string of big ideas the politicians pushed to try and save Atlantic City. “There’s no chance of building additional tourist attractions in a dying city that’s whistling past the graveyard. - Reese Palley My editor’s phone rang the other day. Reese Palley was on the line. He had a message for me. “Tell him I’m not dead yet.” No, he’s not. As for Atlantic City, it’s not dead yet either. But it’s on life support. That was the subject of his call. Prior to the opening of the first casino in 1978, Palley was one of the few successful entrepreneurs in the city. He had art galleries there and in Manhattan and he was famed for self-promoting stunts like flying 725 people to Paris for his 50th birthday. I first spoke to him a couple of years ago, when he was 91. That was right after the Revel hotel-casino opened, billed as yet the latest in a long line of big investments that were supposed to finally turn Atlantic City around. That never works, and Palley diagnosed the reason way back in the late 1970s, when gambling was first legalized. The mistake the politicians made, he said, was that they saw casino gambling as social experiment, a means of lifting the city’s residents out of poverty. Instead, he said, they should have moved the residents out of the city and turned the whole town into a tourist destination. “One of the expressions I got into a lot of trouble with is that what Atlantic City needs is a bulldozer six blocks wide,” he told me in 2012. “Now it needs a bulldozer 12 blocks wide.” I posted that column on my blog the other day, right after news broke that as many as three casinos could close by summer’s end. That prompted a call from Key West, where Palley set up shop after sailing the world for a couple decades with his wife. “The stupidity is mind-boggling,” Palley said when I called him back to discuss the latest pie-in-the-sky plans to save the city. “There’s no chance of building additional tourist attractions in a dying city that’s whistling past the graveyard. They used up all their God-given chances.” Back when A.C.’s only competitor was Las Vegas, he said, there was plenty of money to turn the roughly 8 square miles on Absecon Island into a first-rate tourist trap. That’s roughly the same area as the famed Las Vegas Strip, which is filled with one glitzy attraction after another. Meanwhile, much of A.C. remains occupied by dilapidated housing. There’s even a homeless shelter tourists pass on the way to the casinos. “To have 25,000 people living inside what is supposed to be a tourist destination didn’t work,” he said. “It hasn’t worked anywhere else. You’ve got to follow the pattern happening all over the country where they’re developing tourist attractions.” Instead of doing that, the city added public housing. It now has 40,000 residents. That might please the pols, but tourists have plenty of other options. “People have a thousand choices other than Atlantic City, some with casinos and some without casinos,” he said. “Some are in warm cities.” The weather is yet another reason the city’s in trouble, he said. Tourists tend to forget about the Jersey Shore after Labor Day. The wisdom of Palley’s words was evident even to as eminent a figure as Brendan Byrne, who was governor when gambling was legalized. In an interview with this paper, Byrne said Palley “had the right concept: Make the island a resort and put the housing on the mainland.” Byrne said that in 1998. But by then it was already too late. With casinos springing up everywhere, Atlantic City had lost its advantage. Now there’s only one way to rescue the city, Palley said. “If you want to rebuild the city, bring back the 1920s,” he said. “Legalize marijuana and prostitution.” Palley was joking about the pot, but not about the history. As fans of the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire” know, the Golden Era of Atlantic City occurred during Prohibition, when the town fathers turned a blind eye to booze sales. Without that sort of an edge, Atlantic City’s just another speck of sand on the Jersey Shore. It’s doomed, said the man who saw it coming. “Even with the best of intentions, there is no more money,” he said. “And it would take huge sums of money to convert what is a terrible place into a major tourist attraction. I don’t see even a faint ray of hope.” Neither do I. The social experiment is over. It was a failure. © 2014 NJ. All rights reserved.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 17:30:00 +0000
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