John L. Young called it the Million Dollar Pier, because he said it cost a million dollars to build. That was a lot of money at the time, and so very much something that John L. Young would say. The former lifeguard had been a showman on the Atlantic City boardwalk at various locations, and in 1906 opened his showpiece amusement pier in what was then an up-and-coming New Jersey resort city.
“His twice-daily, deep-sea net hauls were famous, attracting thousands of wide-eyed tourists,” Nelson Johnson writes in Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times And Corruption of Atlantic City. “Wearing knickers, an old sweater and cap, he was a wiry and weathered, red-faced man with sparkling blue eyes, reminiscent of a leprechaun. As he lowered the net to the floor of the pier, Young went into his routine of identifying the sea animals he had caught. It was an animated performance that mesmerized his customers.”
He showed off in other ways on the pier, too. Young built an actual residence for himself—the address was 1 Atlantic Ocean—in the middle of the pier and lived there in summer months. Johnson writes that Young fished with Thomas Edison and hosted President Taft for dinner. The Million Dollar Pier was a success, and Young was president of it until a year before his 1938 death at 84.
The Million Dollar Pier continued on in various forms until 1981. It did not always feature the best entertainment; per Bryant Simon’s Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America, Million Dollar Pier hosted minstrel shows “well into the 1940s.” By the 1970s, the venue still had Young's grandiose name but was simply another amusement park off the boardwalk. Soon after that, the pier began its metamorphosis into what it still is today, which is a shopping mall.
By 1982, work was underway on Ocean One—the American Dreamboat, a $40 million shopping mall over the ocean. Per the Press of Atlantic City, the venue would boast a 20-by-30-foot video screen similar to one used at Shea Stadium. “Then there’s the ‘Good Life Product Rainbow,’” the story continued, “which will be a balloon-like inflated rainbow spanning the exhibit area. At the end of the rainbow (you guessed it) will be a giant pot of gold. The pot of gold will be a ‘shopping basket with all the good products which made the American life so good.’”
The Ocean One mall lasted until 2003. Caesars, the casino across the boardwalk, bought the pier and planned an upscale mall there as part of a plan to diversify in response to Pennsylvania opening slots parlors. That mall had a Tiffany, an Armani, a Coach, a Gucci; the Wikipedia page is quite thorough. Eventually the mall's biggest draw was an Apple Store, which was less of an upmarket status symbol but enough to anchor a pretty good mall. But the mall's high-end concept became untenable as Atlantic City began what has been a long downturn, thanks mostly but not entirely to guests staying in Pennsylvania and other states to gamble.
No matter. Philadelphia developer Bart Blatstein had another idea. He bought the lease on the mall, eventually struck a deal with Caesars, and re-christened it The Playground in 2015. Now it would be a mix of a mall and a series of bars and nightclubs that’d take over the many empty storefronts that had dotted The Pier Shops. “I promise you, this will become the number one tourist attraction in Atlantic City,” Blatstein said at the announcement. “I don’t want to want it to sound oysters here, but I have never failed in my career. I have never not picked an area that has not turned around. This is going to be the greatest success of my career.” Here’s what happened instead: Blatstein sold The Playground to Caesars five years later. (If you have any idea what “sound oysters” means, please let us know; Dan covered the event and knows what he heard.)
Last year the mall was re-christened ACX1 Studios; it was emptier than ever by then, but the new plan was to use that empty space for film production. “You can film here, you can edit here, and your crew can sleep at the hotel without having to go to all these places,” Dom Frank, of ACX1 Studios, told CBS 3. That may well be happening—we did see a storefront for a production company that featured posters for what looked like Christian films, one of which featured Stacey Dash—although the spaces with ACX1 branding in their windows didn't really seem to be open.
It's also still a mall, sort of. And so when the Defector team was in Atlantic City for our annual retreat last week, we took a walkthrough. Ohh, boy.
Dan: Roth, did you enjoy our trip to Atlantic City? I was participating remotely for much of the retreat, but I felt like I was introducing the staff to my culture. It was a nice feeling.
Dave: I enjoyed it for the most part, but I had to keep explaining to coworkers that this wasn’t my New Jersey. “You don't understand,” I would say as they speedwalked away from me, “these people are Eagles fans. The bread on their sandwiches is not cut all the way in half, and they like it that way. They pronounce familiar words in incorrect and unpleasant-sounding ways, but not in the cool way that I do that. This has nothing to do with me.” It was difficult to get the message across. But as deliriously and not always charmingly janky as Atlantic City is, I kind of liked that it was more or less the same as it was when I was last there nearly 20 years ago. Not just in terms of being the same kind of janky, but more like “this is the exact same weird carpeting.” Did you feel like you had to explain some things that would otherwise have been inexplicable?
Dan: Walking through an empty casino during the week in mid-October can be sad. But I kept telling our co-workers that I have had some of the most fun nights in Atlantic City. In my 30s, I was once at a dance party in the weird main room of the Wild Wild West Casino that had an energy worthy of a basement club in my 20s. Ever since casinos started popping up in other places on the East Coast, Atlantic City has been different. It’s been smaller. It was, during our week, empty. But I went for some morning walks on the boardwalk and they were exhilarating. The sun was shining. Workers and walkers were saying hello to people they saw every day. I could hear the ocean. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood. Now, I doubt that was true, but I could pretend.
But, man, the mall. I actually made arrangements with my wife so I could stay down an extra night in order to explore this mall with you. It was absolutely worth it. I took a photo of the mall-manac—get it?—and if you think you’ve been in a dead mall, you really haven’t until you’ve stepped foot onto this pier.
Dave: Yeah, you'd mentioned that this was a dead mall, and while I know what that is I associate it mostly with smaller/sadder spots I've visited, or even a place like the Stroud Mall, which is both very much alive and feels like it's kind of hanging by a thread. Also I could see the big IT'SUGAR store—anecdotal, but our research suggests you can't have a mall in 2024, living or dead, without a Bulk Skittles Option—from the boardwalk so I didn't think it was dead dead. Barry got some risky-seeming energy drink there. And you could still go into the building, and there was still a security guy at the door, and speakers were playing Cheryl Lynn's “Got To Be Real.” These seemed like signs of life.
But yeah, this mall was pretty much dead. There were a few stores that look like they were sometimes open, at some point—maybe on the weekend, or in season, or whenever—but there were a lot more that were just all the way gone. The fact that the mall was so big and so splashy in its overall design really brought home how haunted and strange and small it is in its current iteration. I thought I knew what a dead mall would feel like, but it never occurred to me that a space that was originally some sort of high-end boutique would now be just 1) open and 2) used to store vegetables.
Dan: What’s weird about the mall is it is completely enclosed. It’s over the ocean! But the only views are from one side of the third floor—an area once called “The Beach”—which was closed the day of our visit. The mall was built in the casino architecture style, trying to make you forget that there are other places besides the structure you are currently in. It’s odd.
Dave: I assume that's just force of habit, given that it's Atlantic City. Where you could see the views, they were often pretty spectacular—there's a venue space at the end of the building that has big windows onto the ocean, and I think it'd make for a nice event even if you had to walk by a closed cellphone store and an IT'SUGAR to get there. You mentioned that the (closed) Starbucks once had a famously great view from its bathroom, and Atlantic City's beach really is beautiful. There’s no reason why it shouldn't work, except I guess for the wild and criminal underdevelopment and misgovernment of the city in which it's located, and the fact that it was the offseason, and all the other bigger pressures that make malls close. Those are three decently meaty exceptions, I am now realizing, but my point is that the windows are nice and they might have done well to have more of them. Instead it's that big wall and a bunch of billboard spaces, all of which were blank when we were there.
Dan: The whole mall is really dark, and that is not new. It’s always been kind of dark. But now it’s incredibly fitting. It’s a mall with a handful of stores scattered across two floors, and some bars that also maybe are open sometimes? It should be this dark. I can only hope it becomes the filming mecca it now wishes to be. Think of the horror films they could shoot here.
Dave: It for sure had something of a stage set feel to it. I have some experience in this area and I absolutely think you could make most of a Hallmark movie in there. There's a sports bar (not open when we were there) that as far as I could tell was called Sports Bar and if that shit is not Hallmark I do not know what is. Weirdly, though, Crown Media has mostly stayed away from plot lines involving a young woman fleeing an unfulfilling job in the big city to revive the comatose mall on her hometown's boardwalk in time for the annual Hot Cocoa Festival. What if she opened a peppermint stick shop there, for instance, using her grandma's recipe and maybe with the help of her high school crush, a jarringly Canadian-seeming blackjack dealer? This thing basically writes itself—and produces itself on site, without having to, as the man said, “go all these places.”
Dan: The best thing that I did that morning was hike it down to a dollar store on a different pier up the boardwalk. I spotted them the other day and purchased three of them for 99 cents each: Captain Planet Halloween costumes, dated 1990, from Collegeville Costumes. There were about 15 more of them if you’re interested. I had to wait in a five-person line to buy them. I’d say this mall needs a 99-cent store.
Dave: The Stroud Mall had one! It smelled faintly of burning plastic in there as I remember it, but it did have one. I know you're mostly joking/bragging about your Halloween costume haul, but I feel like there's something to the fact that this mall was built to have upmarket stuff, failed, and then simply … did not replace those places with stores that people might be more inclined or able to actually use. The outlet stores a few blocks inland were popping every time I went by, for instance, and those stores only have views of other outlet stores. But I don't understand this business at all, and I'm sure it's not as easy as just plugging a bunch of more practical shops into the mall and breathing life back into it. As with a lot of Atlantic City stuff, the combination of the white elephant scale of everything and a seemingly exhausted or just checked-out civic imagination makes it both easy to imagine something a bit better and somehow difficult to imagine anything other than what's there.
Dan: There was one store we wanted to go into, but it was closed.
Dave: I did like that of the very few stores we saw that were clearly still in business—the cellphone stores, one of which had a section jauntily labeled "Pouches," and the one jeweler (they did advertise cash for gold, it's still AC), some restaurants/bars closed for the season or just in the afternoon—there was that one sports store. There was one in the Stroud Mall, too, which I remember because I was disappointed by how they didn't mark down all the jerseys they had from guys who'd since been traded to different teams; I am sure that spot had the single most expensive Kevin Durant Nets jersey for sale on earth on its rack.
Dan: I like these stores. I am not sure I have ever purchased an item inside one of them, but I will always pop in and check out what jerseys and hats and schlocky memorabilia they have.
Dave: This one, which is called Sports City, had moved across the hall from a previous location, which you could tell because there was a big football helmet in the otherwise empty old space that said SPORTS CITY, but the space they had sure seemed like a going concern. It is heartening to me, as someone who went to malls exclusively to visit stores like that more than 30 years ago, that one of the last viable mall-based retail experiences is "paying $26 for a Starter hat." It is less heartening to think that stores like this would rather just roll down the shudders for one last time rather than take 25 percent off that Todd Gurley Rams jersey they've had on their shelves for seven years. Again, I don't really know the business.
