Connections: High Roller
Because I learned to play Monopoly in Atlantic City, and to a lesser degree because I grew up in New Jersey, recent news about the city’s financial crisis and the fight between its mayor and Gov. Chris Christie over what to do about it drew my attention. Bankruptcy looms.
Bankruptcy rings a bell if you’ve been paying attention to the presidential primaries, doesn’t it? Donald J. Trump knows all about it, having avowed that filing for reorganization under the federal bankruptcy law is a good way to do business.
The first of his casinos in Atlantic City, the Taj Mahal, which cost $1 billion to build, was “reorganized’ in 1991. Eventually the parent Trump company filed for four casino bankruptcies, the Marina and Plaza casinos in Atlantic City in addition to the Taj Mahal and a riverboat casino in Indiana. Debt was reported to be $1.8 billion, and a lot of small-business owners were said to have borne the brunt.
An Atlantic City visit with family friends was a rare treat when I was a kid. Everything there was big time: the boardwalk, the huge hotels, Steel Pier. I also thought Atlantic City a swell place when I visited as a member of an all-state high school chorus, invited to sing at a teachers convention.
Readers may know that the properties on the Monopoly board are named for actual Atlantic City streets. The game is attributed to a man named Charles Darrow, who, after playing a handmade prototype in the early 1930s, developed the popular version that came out in 1935 from Parker Brothers.
What isn’t particularly known is that Elizabeth Magie, who worked as a stenographer in Washington, D.C., actually invented it in 1903, calling it Landlord’s Game. According to the U.S. edition of The Guardian, she was a leftist and feminist, who worried about “income inequalities so massive and the monopolists so mighty.” Working on it “night after night . . . she wanted her board game to reflect her progressive political views — that was the whole point of it.” She wanted the game to be “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences.”
Which brings us back to poor old Atlantic City. We didn’t venture into the big hotels when I was a kid because they were too fancy. We didn’t ride in the rolling chairs on the boardwalk because that cost too much, too. I didn’t follow the city’s transformation into a gambling center in the last few decades of the century, and I didn’t quite realize how far it has fallen since so many of its casinos closed.
An event there last weekend was advertised as a distraction from the “intensifying cash crisis.” From the Press newspaper of Atlantic City, I learned that the Atlantic City Beer and Music Fest was to “have enough alcohol on hand to keep them entertained once they’re good and soused.” The activities, according to the paper, included beery yoga, motorized toilet races, and a carnival sideshow. I wonder if the organizers thought to invite Donald Trump.