ATLANTIC CITY — A public discussion entitled “The Atlantic City Experience: The Roaring ’20s” will be hosted by the Atlantic City Free Public Library on Saturday, Oct. 13, in the Atlantic City Historical Museum (at Garden Pier on the Boardwalk in front of Revel).
The discussion is scheduled for 11am and will be held in the museum’s boardroom. It is free and open to the public.
Vicki Gold-Levi (pictured below right) and Heather Halpin Perez (left), who are historical consultants for HBO’s smash-hit series Boardwalk Empire, will be the guest speakers. Levi is co-author of Atlantic City: 125 Years of Ocean Madness, and will discuss the culture of the 1920s including the music, movies and clothing. Levi will also be speaking about her late father, Al Gold, the city’s first official photographer, and will be relating some personal experiences including her work for Boardwalk Empire.
Perez is the archivist for the library’s Alfred M. Heston Collection of Atlantic City history, and will be discussing some of the city’s biggest names and most influential people including Enoch “Nucky” Johnson (the late A.C. power broker on whose life the Boardwalk Empire lead character, Nucky Thompson, is loosely based). Perez (a 2012 Atlantic City Weekly Top 40 Under 40 honoree) will also touch on a variety of highlights from the decade, such as the construction of the World War I Memorial and Convention (now Boardwalk) Hall.
The Atlantic City Historical Museum is open 10am-5pm seven days a week and showcases the culturally diverse and exciting history of Atlantic City in a nostalgic timeline. Click here to visit the museum’s Web site or call (609) 347-5839 to learn more. The Atlantic City Free Public Library assumed management of the museum in August 2012.
Also on Oct. 13, as part of the fifth annual Downbeach Film Festival: 2012 Atlantic City Cinefest (Oct. 12-14), HBO has granted permission for the festival to screen a not-yet-aired episode of season three of Boardwalk Empire. The episode will air at 2pm Saturday at Dante Hall Theater of the Arts (14 N. Mississippi Ave.).
Terence Winter, the series creator, producer and head writer, will be on hand to moderate the episode and will conduct a Q&A session afterward. The cost is $5 for the screening. Winter, who wrote the screenplay to the upcoming crime drama film The Wolf of Wall Street being directed by Martin Scorsese, will also participate in a panel on filmmaking Saturday afternoon at Dante Hall after the screening.
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From Pop Lloyd to Pattie Harris to Nucky Johnson and the Northside, not to mention Nina Simone and Sam Cooke and other entertainers' connections to Atlantic City and region.
“There was no crime in Atlantic City — they [the “organization”] took care of crime,” says local resident Richard Black, whose grandfather was a law enforcement official at the time.
His white hair tufted beyond tolerance, the minister stepped into the barbershop and its buzz of bonhomie. Combs raked scalps, scissors snipped furiously, and the scent of lilac water suffused the air. Twenty minutes later, the clergyman stood from the pedestal-chair and surveyed his reshaped dome. The dark skin of his forehead glistened below the white fringe. He paid the barber and paused on the black rubber mat. “Am I good for another dime?” The barber grinned. “You bet.” And so he did — 10 cents on number 357, a wager to be rewarded only if the digits corresponded, respectively, to the last number on each of the day’s win-place-show handles at Aqueduct Racetrack, some 90 miles to the north. The “numbers,” or “policy,” game was a lottery before lotteries were legal. Nearly everyone in town played it even...
In the second part of "Nucky Johnson," the distinguished panel of Atlantic City historians go deeper into the life of the real man behind HBO's Nucky Thompson: Enoch "Nucky" Johnson.
Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, treasurer of Atlantic County, ruled the rackets and the Republican Party in Atlantic City. Former cabbie Louie Kessel ordered his master’s life. Home base was the posh Ritz Carlton Hotel at Iowa Avenue and the Boardwalk (near today’s Tropicana).
Early in the premiere episode of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, a crowd of dapper Atlantic City movers and shakers, partying well into the night in a spiffy supper club, make a familiar countdown, cocktail glasses held high...
By 2000, Hammonton-based historian Nelson Johnson had compiled the first comprehensive history of Atlantic City between two covers, and enlisted the help of two New York literary agents in structuring and marketing the manuscript. His book, called Nucky’s Town (after political boss Enoch “Nucky” Johnson), presented a road map through the storied city by the sea, complete with detours, pitfalls, and pockmarks.
"Eddie lived in a kind of musically optimistic 1920s place even though he had a shitty childhood. His parents died when he was young but his grandmother raised him and he was little and scrawny so he got beaten up a lot. He learned to make jokes so he could avoid getting beaten up, so from then on he realized this singing and dancing thing could work."
Matchless documentarian Ken Burns captures this volatile, surreal scene in his new miniseries Prohibition, which premieres Oct. 2, 3 and 4 at 8pm on PBS. The three-part, five-and-a-half-hour film explores both the forces that produced the U.S. Constitution’s 18th Amendment and ...
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'The whole world now will start listening and really finding out how great the music of the 1920s is. It brings it up to the forefront.'
Seashore history is slippery — some accounts place Capone and his fellow delegates at the President, and Nucky’s digs on the Ritz’s eighth floor — but by any measure, the 1920s roared extra loud in Atlantic City.
In a “news” box on the upper right side of the Archeophone Records home page, there’s a list of the songs played thus far in the first two episodes of HBO’s 'Boardwalk Empire,' set in 1920s Atlantic City.
With Sunday’s debut of Boardwalk Empire fast approaching, let’s look back on the period during which the series takes place, specifically the year 1920, the dawn of the Prohibition era.
Back in the 1920s, A.C. was a hub for all sorts of different nightlife and entertainment, and not just the kind that would be frowned upon by puritan society. There were theaters, amusement parks, music and dance clubs, and some of the biggest names in entertainment appeared regularly or got their career starts on A.C.’s bustling streets.
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