The fifth annual festival takes place at various locations throughout Atlantic City. Features, shorts and documentaries will be screened Friday night at Showboat, Saturday at Dante Hall and the Carnegie Center, and Sunday at Dante Hall and the Golden Nugget. Click here for more.
“The lineup of guests we have attending is second-to-none,” says Nichole Kilpatrick, vice president of Downbeach Film Festival. “This makes our fifth anniversary festival that much more meaningful.”
Click here for more Atlantic City Weekly articles about Boardwalk Empire.
On Sunday, Oct. 14, at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey Campus Center Theater, Vicki Gold-Levi and Stockton’s Visual Arts faculty will present the inauguration of the Al Gold Lecture Series starting 3:30pm.
Michael Bzdak, director of corporate contributions at Johnson & Johnson and a visiting part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, has the honor of being the series’ first guest lecturer. The title of his lecture will be “American Photography, 1912-2012: In the Shadows of Art and Commerce.”
Gold-Levi will speak at the top of the program about her father’s legacy, and will show a selection of his photographs taken in Atlantic City. Al Gold’s foray in photography began in 1921 when he photographed the first Miss America pageant. His photographic skills became widely known and in 1939 he was appointed Atlantic City’s first “chief photographer” — a post he held until his death in 1964.
“Goldie,” as he was affectionately known was one of the most popular new photographers in the East. He was voted posthumously into the Atlantic City Hall of Fame, has a photography gallery dedicated in his name at the Atlantic City Historical Museum, and each year the annual Al Gold Memorial Purchase Award is given annually to two photography students at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
WATCH: Conversations & Storytelling: Atlantic City History Web videos
Atlantic City hosts tattoo expo, antique show, and the 5th annual A.C. Cinefest, plus more.
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 ...
Plus Ludacris concert, 'Diary of Anne Frank' at Stockton PAC and new Grinderman CD
'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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