A Railroad, Walt Whitman, Sand and the First Boardwalk: How Atlantic City became America's Middle Class Playground

 In 1850 local resident Dr. Jonathan Pitney began to promote the idea of Absecon Island, located just off southern New Jersey’s coast, as an ideal seaside medical retreat for many of his patients who suffered from various ailments, everything ranging from tuberculosis to nervous breakdowns.

Pitney extolled the healing properties of ocean air and saltwater to all who would listen, and by 1853 Pitney along with civil engineer Richard Osborne, who would be in charge of the building’s design and construction, were able to successfully pitch the idea of building a major seaside resort on Absecon Island in New Jersey to influential financiers and politicians.

Within a year of the resort’s construction Philadelphia politicians and railroad investors were persuaded enough by Pitney, Osborne and other New Jersey lobbyists to finance a railway that linked the City of Brotherly Love directly with the Jersey Shore and traversed the whole of the Garden State.

On July 4, 1854 by charter of the state of New Jersey the Camden and Atlantic Railroad opened and what we now know as Atlantic City, one of the Jersey Shore’s most famous and notorious, tourist destinations was born.

Over 3,000 people made the trip across the Garden State to Atlantic City on the first day that the railroad was in operation.

During its heyday, spanning roughly the years 1870 to 1930, the Camden and Atlantic railroad was literally world renowned!  In 1879, no less a wordsmith than legendary American poet Walt Whitman, sang the praises of this railroad that traversed New Jersey and of the burgeoning seaside resort of Atlantic City.

In 1873 Whitman, after suffering a minor stroke brought on, so his doctors said, by stress, left his office job working for the federal government in Washington D.C. to live with his brother in Camden, New Jersey.  While recuperating, and residing in Camden, Walt Whitman was able to write and publish his legendary work Leaves of Grass.  The royalties he earned from Leaves of Grass enabled him to pursue his writing career full time and permanently leave behind the stroke-inducing drudgery of governmental clerical work.

Being a full-time writer gave Whitman both the time and inclination to explore his newly adopted home state of New Jersey and oddly enough, Walt Whitman was a huge fan of visiting Atlantic City and its boardwalk and beaches in the dead of winter!

In 1879 he wrote an essay for the Philadelphia Times newspaper about a trip he had taken to Atlantic City only two days prior.  His essay was published in the newspaper on January 26, 1879

Whitman began his essay by mentioning the Camden and Atlantic Railroad in the energetic and effervescent style that only his writing had, especially when it came to something as mundane as railroad transport.

He wrote, “As I went to bed a few Saturday nights ago, it entered my head all of a sudden, decidedly yet quietly, that if the coming morn was fine, I would take a trip across Jersey by the Camden and Atlantic Railroad through to the sea!”

He went on to describe in almost rapturous detail the wintertime landscape of the Garden State that went past outside the locomotive’s window and compared it favorably to his native Long Island.  When Whitman finally arrived at the seaside resort town of Atlantic City, of which he had heard so much about over the course of the past decade and a half since the end of the American Civil War, he was absolutely enamored.

In Whitman’s own words, when describing Atlantic City he wrote, “A flat still sandy, still meadowy region…an island, but with good hard roads and plenty of them, very little show of trees…but in lieu of them a superb range of ocean beach--miles and miles of it for driving, walking bathing--a real Sea Beach City indeed with salt waves and sandy shores ad libitum.”

Walt Whitman

Originally known as Absegami Island by the Native American Lenni-Lenape tribe who had inhabited the region for generations, being later renamed (incorrectly) Absecon Island by European settlers in the 1700’s, the sandy beaches of present day Atlantic City have been a swimming and seaside destination for centuries.  But it wasn’t until 1870 that Atlantic City’s first, and maybe to this day most famous tourist attraction--the Boardwalk--was built.

Atlantic City’s Boardwalk was the first of its kind constructed in the United States.  It cost $5000 to originally build and was constructed in twelve foot sections that were ten feet wide.  The first section of the Atlantic City Boardwalk opened on June 16, 1870.

The original boardwalk contained no shops, rides, games or other tourist attractions, though all of that would come by the turn of the twentieth century but for Atlantic City’s ever growing tourism industry, the construction of America’s first seaside wooden boardwalk was a stroke of pure genius.

Before the Boardwalk in 1870, seaside visitors to Atlantic City, most of whom unlike Walt Whitman came during the Summer months and not in the dead of winter for ocean “bathing” as it was called at the time, could stay at hotels mere feet from the ocean, but they had to contend with the harsh reality of walking outside their doors and into the blowing sand.

City planners and developers never imagined how much of an issue sand would be for either hotel owners or tourists.  But the ever present sand being tracked through hotel rooms apparently kept many potential visitors away from seaside resorts.  It became such a problem that by 1870 the City enlisted the help of a railroad conductor named Jacob Keim and a hotel owner named Alexander Boardman (no joke!) to come up with a solution to the problem.

Keim and Boardman came up with the idea of building an 8 foot wide walkway of wooden planks arranged in a herringbone patten, on top of a concrete foundation, all the way from the beach to the center of town.  Their proposal was adopted and America’s first boardwalk was born.

Along the Boardwalk ca. 1900 note 'Rolling Chairs' for Ladies

Interestingly enough the Atlantic City Boardwalk has been completely destroyed and rebuilt three times during its existence due to hurricanes in 1884, 1889 and 1944.  Large sections were also severely damaged and had to be rebuilt in the aftermath of  Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

The original boardwalk, built in 1870 was a simple affair, and it didn’t even have railings!  It was reported that every day at least one person, usually a man in the act of flirting, would fall off the boardwalk and into the sand--some being seriously injured.

Though simple, and replaced within fifteen years of its original construction by a much larger mile long boardwalk raised above the sand on pilings, the original Atlantic City Boardwalk proved to be one-hundred percent effective at accomplishing the purpose for which it was built--keeping sand out of the city’s many hotels.

By 1900 amusement piers with shops, carnival rides and food stands had already been built, all of which were connected by wooden walkways to Atlantic City’s Boardwalk.   And in 1929 Atlantic City’s world famous Convention Hall, a venue that hosts marquee concerts and sporting events to this very day, was built.

Thanks to a railroad across New Jersey, and a wooden walkway dreamed up by a conductor and a hotel owner, by 1907 just over twenty-five years after Walt Whitman first visited Atlantic City in the dead of winter, another visitor, this one from England, an American correspondent for the London Daily Chronicle named Sir Alfred Maurice Low was able to write after a visit to the Jersey Shore in his own newspaper column that, “The most famous seashore resort in America is Atlantic City, the playground of the great middle class.”

Late  Victorian Women's Bathing Suit

Low’s nickname, for better or worse, has stuck ever since.  But he didn’t stop there.  Though not quite as enamored with the 1907 version of Atlantic City, as Whitman had been with the pristine beach resort he had laid eyes upon in 1879, and though Low was somewhat put off by what he considered to be the low morality of Atlantic City’s tourism (particularly the scandalous bathing costumes of the admittedly attractive young ladies) even he, nonetheless, couldn’t help but describe America’s premier seaside resort destination in almost Whitman-esque terms.

He wrote, “It is a place where the God of Pleasure reigns supreme, where people give themselves up to merriment, where for a week or month they spend there, they leave care behind, and endeavor to get as much fun as possible, out of life.”

To this very day, nearly one-hundred and twenty years later, though much has changed much has still remained the same and we’re all still heading across New Jersey, going down the shore, and in many cases still going to Atlantic City itself and endeavoring to get as much fun out of life as possible…

All quotes in this article come from: Shore Chronicles: Diaries & Travellers’ Tales from the Jersey Shore 1764-1955.

-ed. Margaret Thomas Buchholz and published by Down the

Shore Publishing, West Creek, New Jersey.  1999