Atlantic City was one of the first American cities conceived from scratch, not built around any preëxisting industry but created solely to be a destination for its own sake. So the city’s fortunes have always depended on the wheelers and dealers who have contrived, throughout the years, to give people new, more exciting, and often gaudier reasons to go there. “If not for zany schemes, Atlantic City would still be a sand dune,” Nick Paumgarten wrote in his 2015 story “The Death and Life of Atlantic City.” The Revel casino—a $2.4 billion monstrosity that opened in 2012, only to fold two years later, riddled with financial difficulties, which Paumgarten documented—was the highest-profile zany scheme to hold out the promise of growth and riches in recent years, but became a towering symbol of spectacular, Atlantic City-style failure.

In this short documentary from an episode of our TV show, “The New Yorker Presents” (Amazon Originals), Paumgarten discusses the history of Atlantic City and the “build it and they will come” approach to business that initially made the city a premier vacation destination, and later contributed to its economic downfall. The film also features small-business owners and other locals who witnessed the rise and fall of the Revel. One of these is Mike Hauke, who moved to Atlantic City and opened a restaurant down the street from the Revel, counting on the business it would bring in. His storefront is now isolated in a hard-to-access stretch of wasteland beyond the Revel’s shell. Another is Martin Wood, who was born in Atlantic City and runs a pawn shop that was established in 1927. Wood has seen a number of schemes and businesses come and go. “Nothing has ever worked here,” he says, “other than what’s here already—the beach and the boardwalk.”

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