Atlantic City

Lia and I walked onto the Atlantic City Boardwalk at dusk, just as the casino marquees were flickering on one by one down the strip, and understood immediately why this four-mile stretch of wooden planks, built in 1870, became the template for every boardwalk that followed — the one that gave the very word “boardwalk” to the American vocabulary, and later lent its street names to the game of Monopoly. Rolling wicker chairs still trundle tourists past saltwater taffy shops and fortune tellers, the Atlantic churning grey and constant just beyond the rail.

The Boardwalk and the casinos

We spent an evening drifting between the casino floors, from the marble-and-gilt excess of the Borgata to the older, more weathered halls that still carry a whiff of the city’s 1980s heyday, when Atlantic City was the only legal gambling stop between Nevada and Europe. Lia, no gambler, was more taken by the Boardwalk itself: street performers, a century-old carousel, and Lucy the Elephant a few miles south in Margate, a six-story wooden elephant built in 1881 that you can actually walk through, one of the strangest roadside monuments we’ve found anywhere in the country.

Steel Pier and the beach

By day, the city softens into something more ordinary and more likeable: a wide, genuinely good Atlantic beach, families staking out umbrellas below the boardwalk’s shadow, and the Steel Pier stretching out over the waves with its Ferris wheel and helicopter rides. We rode the historic wheel at sunset, the whole coastline unfurling below in a long amber line, casinos on one side and open ocean on the other, and it was, unexpectedly, one of the best views we found anywhere on the Jersey Shore.

Chicken Bone Beach and Ducktown

Away from the casino strip, we found a quieter, older Atlantic City: Chicken Bone Beach, once the segregation-era stretch of shoreline reserved for Black beachgoers and now marked with a historical plaque and a summer jazz series honoring that history, and Ducktown, the Italian-immigrant neighborhood that still holds some of the city’s best red-sauce restaurants, largely untouched by the tourist crowds a few blocks north. We ate clams casino — reportedly invented here — at a family-run spot that has been serving the same recipe for three generations.

Getting There

Atlantic City International Airport, about fifteen minutes northwest, handles domestic and charter flights, though many visitors drive in via the Atlantic City Expressway, roughly an hour from Philadelphia and around two and a half hours from New York City. The Garden State Parkway also runs the length of the Jersey Shore, making it easy to combine Atlantic City with a broader coastal road trip.