A history of heady Steel Pier

Steel Pier, Atlantic City
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nolead ends nolead begins By Steve Liebowitz

Down the Shore. 264 pp. $39

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Reviewed by Bill Kent

From 1930, when "March King" John Philip Sousa signed an exclusive contract, to the dawn of the casino era, Atlantic City's Steel Pier hosted thousands of entertainers, showbiz personalities, and circus acts: Ray Charles, Abbott and Costello (working together for the first time), Frank Sinatra doing nine shows a day with the Harry James Band, Diana Ross, Dick Clark, the Rolling Stones, and several Diving Horses.

Located near the northern end of the Boardwalk at Virginia Avenue (opposite what is now the Trump Taj Mahal casino), its busy, frenetic atmosphere has been re-created in movies, novels, a Kander and Ebb musical (that bombed on Broadway, alas, in 1997) and, soon, Boardwalk Empire, an HBO TV series, created by and starring some Sopranos alumni, set in a thinly fictionalized Prohibition-era Atlantic City.

Though it was not the first amusement pier to stretch eastward from the Boardwalk into the Atlantic Ocean, Steel Pier was the city's longest, at precisely 1,621 feet, later extended to 2,000. Built in 1898 at a cost of $200,000, this brave new pier was the first to use steel beams on iron pilings. In 112 years, it has suffered greatly from storms, fires, and a blow from a barge that sliced it in half.

All that remains of Atlantic City's most famous landmark is a barren 1,000-foot slab of concrete opposite the Trump Taj Mahal casino hotel complex, but the pier's glory days live again in Steel Pier, Atlantic City, a big nostalgic history of the pier from Down the Shore Publishing, one of South Jersey's few independent publishers.

The book documents the pier's evolution from a sedate late-Victorian edifice to a long, glitzy rocket gantry laid on its side with a golden geodesic dome at its end in the 1960s.

But the book is less an account of the pier than of the people who made it possible. The pictures show thousands of faces - on the Boardwalk, in the pier's numerous showrooms - most of them smiling and slightly dazed from summertime sensory overload.

Baltimore-based author Steve Liebowitz's lively historical narrative tends to be short on analysis but long on first-person accounts, with quotations from old newspaper articles and other sources and from interviews. Among those he quotes: Frankie Valli, Dick Clark, former Diving Horse rider Sarah Detwiler Hart, and George Hamid Jr.

It was Hamid, who with his father, Lebanese-born acrobat George Hamid, and Atlantic City entrepreneur Frank Gravatt transformed what was just another Jersey Shore amusement pier into an entertainment destination that aspired to be all things to all people.

Well, almost all people. Liebowitz points out that for most of the first half of the 20th century, African Americans were discouraged from visiting the Boardwalk and its piers, unless they were pushing rolling chairs.

Nor did African Americans perform on the piers. White performers "blacked up" to appear in Steel Pier's minstrel shows. Among them was a Philadelphian named William Claude Dukenfield, who got his first brush with fame when he quit the show and took his juggling talents elsewhere, as W.C. Fields.

Black stars - including Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Bessie Smith - performed in the city's Kentucky Avenue nightclub district.

Gravatt bought Steel Pier for $2 million in 1930. The son of an Atlantic City carpet salesman, he had dropped out of school, parlayed his paper route into a series of businesses, and made a fortune in Atlantic City real estate two decades before the Monopoly game was invented.

Gravatt came up with Steel Pier's formula for success: an immaculately clean facility stressing convenience and modernity, family attractions repeated daily, a low admission price, lots of advertising and publicity stunts.

In the same way rival Atlantic City casinos fought over Sinatra in the 1980s, Gravatt outbid other pier owners for the exclusive services of "march king" Sousa. Gravatt's Steel Pier Opera Company brought high culture to the masses, with all performances in English.

And if you wanted to know the weather at the Jersey Shore, you need only tune to WFPG (the call letters were Gravatt's initials) broadcasting from Steel Pier.

Gravatt also hired a manager who would ultimately buy him out. George Hamid had previously booked acts for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and added circus performers to Steel Pier's mix. Hamid added a flagpole sitter at the front of the pier to attract Boardwalk foot traffic. He had numerous Diving Horses take scheduled plunges several times a day so that every one of the 12,000 people visiting the pier could see the act that will be forever associated with Steel Pier and Atlantic City.

Hamid eventually passed Steel Pier's baton to Hamid Jr., who, in the 1960s, found that the family crowds on which Steel Pier depended were getting smaller, while the fees charged by pop and rock stars were growing larger. He tried to compete with more lavish amusement rides and a water circus, but found himself priced out of his league.

In 1973, Hamid sold the pier to Atlantic City hotel owners Sonny Goldberg and Milt Neustadter, who ended up spending more money on repairs than they were taking in at the gate, even at $3 a head.

The pier was finally sold to Resorts International in 1978, the same year Resorts opened the first legal casino in Atlantic City inside the former Haddon Hall Hotel. Resorts used the pier for a boxing match and a place to house animals used in the casino show. A 1982 fire closed the pier for good.

Steel Pier passed to Donald Trump when he took over Resorts in 1987. Trump replaced what was left of Steel Pier with the current concrete structure, operating it briefly as a high-roller heliport. The only reminder of Steel Pier's glory days occurred in 1993, when a diving horse act was included among the carnival rides. The act drew protests from animal-rights activists and did not return.

"Steel Pier died," Liebowitz concludes, "because people stopped caring about it, and the crowds stopped coming."

And yet, as I turned the pages of this book and saw so many, many people having the time of their lives, I began to care, not so much about a place that has come and gone, but about the kind of imaginative, entrepreneurial spirit that made Atlantic City the fun, fascinating place it was.

Someone should read this book, and make history repeat itself.