100 Years of Magic at Atlantic City's Steel Pier
By Steven V. Cronin
Staff Writer
The Steel Pier has survived a century of storms, fires and shifting public tastes. It stretches 1,000 feet into the Atlantic across the Boardwalk from the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort. But it also exists in thousands of minds as a glittering entertainment palace, a place where Bobby Darin still performs "Mack the Knife" four times daily and pretty women astride large horses still plunge into deep pools of sun-tinted water.
The new Steel Pier is less than half the size of its famous predecessor, but physical measurements don't tell the whole story, the story of how the Steel Pier has grown in memory. You can't measure legend in feet and inches.
"The Steel Pier became the Steel Pier of the mind. You can't capture how big it was, how spectacular it was. It was like going to a circus, the theater and the movies all in one day. It was a baby-sitter on rainy days. It was a rite of passage for teenagers. It was the greatest summer job for many people who grew up here. It was, simply, the Showplace of the Nation," said Vicki Gold Levi, an Atlantic City historian who fondly remembers her own childhood days spent hanging around the pier.
The pier opened June 18, 1898, when William McKinley was president, Teddy Roosevelt was a mid-level politician making a name for himself on a little-known Cuban hill and Atlantic City was rapidly developing its reputation as the Playground of the World.
In those pre-automobile, pre-airplane days, the train was the way vacationers traveled. Atlantic City proved a quick, easy ride from most cities on the east coast.
The city boasted the sea to bathe in, grand hotels to sleep in and the Boardwalk and amusement piers for anyone not interested in wasting precious vacation time on either of the previous two.
"Atlantic City invented the boardwalk and it invented the amusement pier. Steel Pier wasn't the first amusement pier, but it has become the one everyone thinks of," said Levi.
Larger than life
The resort has always been a place of wild claims and big ideas. What made Atlantic City unique was that most of the claims proved true and many of the ideas panned out.
In its heyday the Steel Pier stretched more than a quarter mile out into the roiling Atlantic surf. Covered with thousands of electric lights and dozens of signs and billboards, the pier was a self-contained entertainment Mecca with a great view of the city's skyline - not that anyone had time to notice.
There was simply too much to see on the pier, and it was all covered in one low admission price. The Marine Ballroom featured some of the best bands in the country. The pier's two or three movie houses showed the day's most popular films and the casino theater featured the top entertainers in the nation. At the end of the pier, crowds piled into the Water Circus stadium, where divers knifed into the ocean and aerialists like the Flying Wallendas soared over the bleachers. The world-famous diving-horse finished off each show.
Fans flocked to see the vaudeville shows at the pier during the 1920s, Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly sat on a flagpole and people competed in dance contests during the Depression. Bob Hope entertained servicemen and their dates during World War II. Mickey Rooney and Milton Berle were booked when Democrats staged their 1964 National Convention in Atlantic City, although Dick Clark's road show proved a bigger draw among the politicos who visited the pier.
Miss America Crowned
It was the place where Miss America was crowned and thousands fell in love for the first time. It was also where stars like "Annie's" Andrea McArdle got their start by performing in the Tony Grant's "Stars of Tomorrow" show.
People brought their lunch, they stayed all day. Sometimes they stayed all night too.
"Some people would go in at 10 in the morning and not leave until 10 the next morning," said George Hamid Jr., who owned the pier for three decades starting in the mid-1940s.
Hamid's father booked acts for the Steel Pier through the 1920s and 1930s for Frank Gravatt, an Atlantic City entrepreneur with a P.T. Barnum-esque sense of showmanship. It was Gravatt and Hamid who brought the diving horse to Atlantic City and guaranteed the pier a place in the national consciousness. The pier and its heyday are still such a part of American popular culture that they were the theme of a short-lived Broadway musical last year.
Performers who worked the pier covered the entertainment gamut - everybody from W.C. Fields to the Rolling Stones sweated before the crowds in Atlantic City. And those entertainers worked, playing four or five shows a day for $5,000 per week.
"The acts didn't have much of an option. At that time there weren't many places where they could go and get green money for working. After the war the Steel Pier and Las Vegas were the only places in America that had a big-name booking policy," said Hamid.
That's how the pier could afford to offer so much for so little - admission price was $2.75 in the 1970s and $1.75 when Ricky Nelson was the headline act in 1958.
"During the Depression the pier was a light at the end of the tunnel for many desperately poor people. They could come, spend a day, and for 50 cents see the best entertainment in the world," Hamid said.
In the 1960s and 1970s Hamid operated the pier and a string of movie theaters in Atlantic City. He recalls that it was cheaper to spend a day at the pier, with the opportunity to see three movies, a headliner, the Water Circus and several variety acts, than to sit through a two-hour movie in town.
Hamid could write a book about his experiences with entertainers who performed at the pier during his tenure there.
He talks about picking up Mick Jagger ("The sweetest young man you'd want to meet") and the Rolling Stones at the airport in July 1966 and giving them a ride to town in his convertible. Or the time Nelson played the pier on Labor Day Sunday 1958 and Hamid got a call at 6 a.m. saying the kids were already lined up down the Boardwalk to Gardener's Basin waiting to see the show.
"We set a record that day - 44,211 people attended," Hamid recalls proudly.
Or there was the time a booking agent called during the winter of 1957 and recommended Hamid immediately book an unknown singer for a summer engagement.
"He said this singer was going to be as hot as the dickens in a few months. I turned him down. I said 'I've played Perry, Tony and Frank. The country will never go for a guy with a crazy name like Elvis,' " Hamid said.
But Hamid doesn't kick himself. For every Elvis Presley he turned down there are the memories of the good decisions and great deals. Hamid recalls booking Rosemary Clooney in the 1940s for $1,000 a week. Then there was the time he booked Frankie Avalon at $5,000 for one week and Fabian at $2,500 for another "and they were tickled to get it."
The Beatles were the only act that proved too big for the pier. When Hamid brought them to the Resort in 1964 he booked them into the Boardwalk Convention Center.
The Bay City Rollers, on the other hand, had no trouble fitting their crowd into the pier's showroom. Touted as 1976s answer to the Fab Four, the Rollers were part of a summer lineup that included everyone from Enzo Stuarti to Isaac Hayes. Even in its last years offering live entertainment, the pier had something for everyone.
People were courteous
People were different when they came to the pier - or at least that's how pier veterans remember it.
Despite the tens of thousands who visited daily, the pier was never plagued by litter, Hamid recalls.
"They respected it. They would throw their soda cups away. You wouldn't look down and find junk on the floor or thrown onto the beach," he said.
Many others cite this one shared memory when they talk about the pier: You could place your lunch on one of the upstairs picnic tables when you arrived in the morning, and it would still be there, undisturbed, when you came looking for it that afternoon.
Just about everybody brought their lunch. Atlantic City ordinances prohibited amusement piers from selling anything but "stand-up food," such as hot dogs, potato chips and soda.
"We were happy to let people bring their lunch. We knew we could always sell them the sodas they'd drink with it," Hamid said.
Of course everyone also remembers their time at the pier as the venue's golden age. Talk to them about the pier and you get the distinct impression that things started going downhill at the Steel Pier soon after they stopped visiting. It's human nature. It's what happens when fact and fantasy blend to create legend.
Finding romance
Love is a flower that grows in summer. It springs up along the boardwalks and beaches like wildflowers along old railroad sidings. In Atlantic City, the Steel Pier was among the most fertile places for affection to take root.
Couples would sway together to the sound of big band music in the Marine Ballroom. Young women would clutch their men and scream in exaggerated panic as the diving bell gave its trademark jolt before rising to the surface. Teens would eye each other while baking in the sun during the Water Circus and try to stage casual meetings as they strolled through the arcades or ran through the haunted house.
For the lovelorn there were the fortune-telling fowl - trained birds who would deliver the future written on pieces of paper they'd pick up with their beaks. There was always a chance the birds would predict the imminent arrival of true love.
Dinah Shore saw a George Montgomery film while performing at the pier in 1941 and fell in love with the handsome actor's screen image. Shore eventually met Montgomery and married him in 1943. Some locals shake their heads knowingly - it was the old pier magic at work again.
"It was a romantic place. It's a shame everyone can't grow up with a place like that," said Arnette French, who left her home near Savannah, Ga., and came to the Steel Pier as an 18-year-old diving horse girl during the Depression. It was at the pier that French fell in love with the guy who piloted Rex the Wonder Dog around in a speedboat during the Water Circus shows.
His name was Jacob French and he used the Steel Pier to his advantage as he courted the young Georgia beauty.
"It started when he taught me dancing. We would go dancing at the pier every night after work. We would stay around and take advantage of all the shows and the bands that were playing there," French said. "I don't understand when I hear people talk about how they wake up and don't want to go work. I never did. I'd wake up and I couldn't wait to get to work - it was wonderful."
French worked at the pier for 12 years. She gave up her job as a diving horse girl to work other jobs in the Water Circus after a freak diving accident blinded her sister, Sonora Carver, perhaps the most famous of the diving horse girls.
Chip Brames, owner of Danyon Advertising in Atlantic City, is another local who once earned his keep working at the pier. Brames' family had a long association with the pier. His grandfather worked at the pier and told the youngster stories about the old days. One story was about a pair of struggling show-business newcomers who kept trying to scrounge left over props and costumes. Brames, of course, was impressed. Who hadn't heard of Abbott and Costello?
Brames started his career at the pier selling program books. He eventually rose to the position of assistant manager. Brames recalls playing cards with the Lennon sisters between shows and getting friendly with Neil Sedaka as the singer waited to perform.
"I never wanted to go home. Even when I got off work I would hang around," Brames recalls.
Getting through bad times
Fate and nature haven't always been good to the pier. In its 100-year history the entertainment center has suffered fire, flood and urban renewal, always bouncing back to offer entertainment. Each time the old-timers looked glum and mumbled that things would never be the same.
The pier suffered its first big fire in 1924, when it was damaged in a blaze that also destroyed the Bothwell and Senator hotels on Virginia Avenue. The pier was modified and venues were enlarged in the 1920s. In 1944 a storm damaged the pier so severely that Gravatt was willing to sell the structure rather than spend the money on repairs. This opened the door for Hamid and his son to purchase the pier. A storm in the 1950s knocked the end off the pier. The structure was rebuilt, but the infamous March 1962 storm not only knocked the end off again, it also knocked down a section in the middle of the pier. Again the pier was rebuilt and again it was damaged, this time by a severe fire in 1969.
But it wasn't these disasters that spelled the end of the Steel Pier as a nationally known entertainment venue. That was accomplished, Hamid said, by the twin forces of Atlantic City's decline and rebirth.
Tourists began flying to vacation spots in Florida and the Caribbean. Blocks of Atlantic City were demolished in the early 1970s as part of urban renewal projects. There was nothing for tourists to see in Atlantic City and few places for them to stay.
"As the tourists stopped coming to Atlantic City the numbers (for the Steel Pier) declined. It got tougher to run. The end really came when legislation passed in 1976 allowing gambling in Atlantic City. We knew we could never get Frank Sinatra to play four shows on Saturday and five on Sundays when he could get the same money for playing the Golden Nugget for one night," Hamid said.
The pier was eventually torn down and converted into a heliport for the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort.
But the pier seems made for entertainment. Six years ago the heliport was replaced by the pier's latest incarnation - an over-the-water amusement park. The pier now attracts up to 500,000 visitors a year. It stretches 1,000 feet from the Boardwalk, 1,400 feet shorter than the original.
"People always talk about how it's not what it used to be, but the old pier wouldn't have been able to survive, it couldn't compete in Atlantic City today," said Anthony Catanoso, president of Atlantic Pier Amusements, which leases the pier from the Trump organization.
Recent city ordinances allow casino development on most Atlantic City piers. In the future Trump or another developer might convert a portion of the pier to gambling space, hotel rooms or restaurants. Atlantic Pier has two years remaining on its lease with Trump, said Catanoso. After that, Atlantic Pier will probably extend its lease on a year-by-year basis, he said.
While Rudy Vallee, Frank Sinatra and Herman's Hermits will no longer draw crowds to the pier, Catanoso said the venue's latest incarnation still occupies a central role in many visitors' Atlantic City experience.
"You have 37 million people a year on that Boardwalk, and not all 37 million of them are of gambling age. Atlantic City will always need a place that offers full-sized, first-class family entertainment. You can never tell what the future will be, but you know that need will always be there," he said.
