Geoffrey Ansel Agrons Photography

Atlantic City: Transition and Loss

There is no way to remember my father apart from the story of Atlantic City, New Jersey, in its heyday, decline, and troubled reinvention as a gambling destination. This is the story my father told me. Like the city itself, it is both real and confabulatory.

Eugene was delivered at Atlantic City Hospital on December 18, 1923. His mother, Rebecca, died during or shortly after childbirth. One year later, my grandfather, Alexander, altered my father’s birth certificate after marrying Cecelia, Rebecca’s sister. Cecelia would later give birth to three daughters. Until he prepared to embark for the Pacific Theater of World War II and his father was legally obligated to produce an accurate record of his birth, my father was unaware that the woman who raised him was his aunt, and that the three girls were simultaneously his first cousins and half-sisters.

The reluctant steward of a new origin story, my father entered service in the U.S. Army. He maintained until his death that no member of the family wrote to him while he was overseas. My brother and I did not learn our father’s full history until the 1970s.

A change in our father’s behavior coincided with the appearance of a large photograph on our living room wall—a framed, full-length, sepia-toned portrait in profile. There was no mistaking the family resemblance. Our paternal grandmother was a careworn simulacrum of this lovely young woman.

“Your grandmother is not my real mother, you know,” he would say, often apropos of nothing. He did not seem to realize or care that he had grown repetitive.

“We’re aware, Dad.”

Visitors were inevitably directed toward the portrait.

“Would you like to see a photograph of my real mother?”

With rare exceptions, Atlantic City was the only destination beyond our home in Vineland, New Jersey, to which my agoraphobic father was willing to drive-and then only for the day. My grandparents lived in a tired apartment building on South State Avenue called Le Chateau. The halls smelled of gefilte fish and brisket. A clanking, slow elevator with an accordion gate was a ready-made playground.

I remember my paternal grandparents as loving and kind to my brother and me. My father, however, was tense. Coiled. Upon arrival, he would make a beeline for the mahogany liquor cabinet. He did not ask; he helped himself. He drank. Fortified by brandy, he settled into the visit.

My younger brother and I—perhaps oblivious, perhaps inchoately sensitive to the simmering family dysfunction—turned our attention to the fading grandeur of the Boardwalk, a short distance from my grandparents’ building. The route took us past blocks of boarding houses and homes. Today, none remain, replaced by casinos or the vacant lots of long-abandoned development projects. The largely Jewish community of Atlantic City's inlet neighborhood has disappeared.

The city maintained a hold on my father, even as he cynically disparaged it for its tawdry promises of rebirth and renewal.  The allure of legalized gambling as a panacea was, for him, the perfect metaphor for a town built on illusion and get-rich-quick schemes. At the same time, he was nostalgic for the 1930s. As a high school teacher, the social changes of the 1960s unsettled him.  He was alienated by his student's language, dress, and musical tastes. He consoled himself with recordings of big band era artists and vocalists, including Ella Fitzgerald, Sara Vaughan, and Billie Holiday.  He remained a man out of time.

My grandfather died of heart disease when I was thirteen. My grandmother-I never thought of her as my great-aunt-remained in the apartment. Inexplicably, Le Chateau was left standing even as every other building on her block was demolished. She was a heavy smoker and eventually became crippled by emphysema. My father dutifully drove from Vineland to Atlantic City every weekend to visit his stepmother until her death. I imagine they sat in silence.

Three decades after Cecelia's death, my father was living at the New Jersey Veterans Memorial Home in Vineland.  He had developed dementia.  A security anklet was intended to prevent residents from wandering, but one day his was inadvertently removed, and he left the grounds.  Local police officers grew concerned when they spotted an elderly man walking along the unpaved shoulder of the Northwest Boulevard.  When they questioned him, my father was certain of his destination.  

"I'm going to Atlantic City."