'I drank the Kool-Aid,' says Frank Nero, former New Jersey economic development official who was the mayor of the northern New Jersey town North Plainfield at the time. The gambling industry would provide jobs and send money back into the community that had been in a steady decline after World War II-that was the theory, anyway. Voters approved casinos in a statewide referendum, after initially rejecting them, amid considerable industry hype. 'The only name that you'll hear me call him is 'Governor.'') 'Chris Christie has been elected as governor by the people of the state of New Jersey,' Guardian tells The American Prospect. (Asked about the turmoil in Trenton, Guardian takes the high road.

The crisis finds Christie picking fights with his colleagues this week he called Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian, a fellow Republican, ' a liar.' Worse, Christie is spending a lot of time outside New Jersey to campaign with GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump, one of Atlantic City's most notorious casino moguls and a man whose casino bankruptcies helped speed the city on its downward spiral. But when the governor is Chris Christie, all bets are off. The empty casino buildings along the city's fabled boardwalk stand as grim totems to the perils of seizing on gambling as the antidote to municipal distress.Ī fiscal calamity of this magnitude should be the catalyst for collaboration. Atlantic City made a bad bet, yoking its economic aspirations to a single industry in a market that has since become saturated with casinos all up and down the East Coast.

Atlantic City ushered in the era of 'gaming,' as the industry likes to call it, on the East Coast-but today, city and state officials are bickering over last-ditch proposals to pull the city back from the precipice of bankruptcy. It was the ultimate Faustian bargain: Gambling industry investments would save the fading grand dame of the Jersey Shore. In 1976, visions of dollars sloshing into municipal and state coffers lured New Jersey voters into establishing casino gambling into Atlantic City. Four decades ago, Atlantic City rolled the dice on the city's future-and lost.

Map of atlantic city casinos 2017