When that didn’t work, the answer was to find Atlantic City a new vice to profit from. State officials legalized gambling here in the late 1970s, in hopes that casinos would re-build the city.

That brought a boom. But it didn’t last. The city’s decline began a decade ago, when Pennsylvania and other states legalized gambling. Unlike glitzy Las Vegas, Atlantic City had a low-rent, bus-born business model, based on its position as the shortest distance between a gambler and a slot machine.

Now, suddenly, it wasn’t.

“We were the ‘convenience gambler.’ Well, [we] lost the convenience gambler. It’s all gone,” said Nick Amato, a lawyer at the firm Genova Burns who has worked in casinos and government here.

By the time Christie was elected, the city was bleeding gamblers. Six of the 11 casinos were in financial trouble, according to reports from the time. And the state’s revenue from casino taxes had fallen by a third since 2006, in figures adjusted for inflation.

At that point, Christie had at least three options.

The first was to do nothing.

Let the free market drive out the weaker casinos. Hope that the city government and the big casino corporations would innovate their way out of the problem — perhaps by re-creating Las Vegas’s mix of gaudy shows, nightclubs and celebrity chefs. The city, clearly, did not want his help.

“The best thing that they could have done is left Atlantic City alone,” said Lorenzo Langford (D), a former pit boss at the Trump Taj Mahal who was then the city’s second-term mayor.

This was the small-government solution. But Christie didn’t see Atlantic City as a pure free-market problem to begin with, spokesman Kevin Roberts said: Its gambling economy had been created by government in the first place, with a state-granted monopoly. And anyway, it seemed risky to leave the saving to others.

The casino companies weren’t obligated to save Atlantic City — in fact, some of them had out-of-state operations that were already cannibalizing the town’s business. And the city itself had been rendered fat and inefficient by casino taxes. It was still paying $1 million a year in pensions for long-retired city lifeguards who only ever worked four months a year — a political favor from 1928 that nobody had ever undone.

Christie’s second option was to kill the old Atlantic City instead of just waiting for it to die.