"A Transient in Casino Row"
Atlantic City, N.J
May 28, 1983
Dear Folks,
I am sitting on a bench in a still sleepy Atlantic City, watching and listening to the restless ocean. The hazy sun is just peeping up from the Atlantic, and, except for a few hungry seagulls and a couple of joggers, this stretch of the boardwalk along the casinos is probably as deserted as it ever gets.
Last night I stayed in a rescue mission in a room with twenty-nine other transients--a sleepless night, with all the hacking and snoring and the drunks stumbling against my bed.
I had no intention of coming anywhere near Atlantic City. My plan was to go in a line from Washington to Baltimore, then to Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. Then, a week ago, I received a phone call from a free-lance writer who wanted to interview me.
She asked if I could meet her in "A.C." I said yes--mistakenly thinking that the old resort city was somewhere along the ocean close to New York City. Later, when I looked on a map, I saw it was 60 miles southeast of Philadelphia. I had a strong urge to call back and tell her to forget the interview. The idea that for the first time on the walk I'd be going backward instead of forward was most disturbing. However, my curiosity got the better of me, and so I left the "City of Brotherly Love" to go to New Jersey, the "Garden State."
Philadelphia can best be pictured as an "inverted donut." Surrounding the city is a light area of lush countryside and expensive suburbs which suddenly turns into a wide ring of dark ghettos of trash-filled streets, tens of thousands of unemployed poor, and probably a like number of abandoned buildings. In the center of the city, the light area returns again in the form of new office towers, green parks, sparkling water fountains, tree-lined boulevards, and well-preserved, stone-pillared libraries and museums.
But now I'm in Atlantic City, which looks like a sprawling junkyard of seedy motels amd bars, graced only by a string of pearls someone threw along its eastern edge--the Boardwalk with its casinos and trinket shops.
All the way across New Jersey, it was a rare moment when anyone said "Hello." I was puzzled and disappointed to be treated as if I were distrusted and disliked.
Several locals I talked with said there has been a recent large influx of unemployed and unskilled transients into south New Jersey looking for work in the booming "casino row" of Atlantic City. So, ironically, south New Jersey finds itself with more unemployment and crime than ever before.
"We who've lived here all our lives are scared anymore," said the owner of a bar halfway between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. "It ain't like twenty years ago when people waved and stopped to talk. It's a rougher bunch now, we can't trust no one."
He needn't have told me. Many homes and businesses I passed were unkempt or abandoned and guarded by vicious attack dogs.
The biggest disappointment of my walk so far would have to be New Jersey. But time, like the waves of the ocean, has a tendency to alter a lot of things--opinions included.
Steven