Crime, Moyers discovered, had risen 80 percent since Resorts opened. A third of the city's homes had been destroyed, but the casino gold rush had made land so expensive that most buildings couldn't be replaced. One specualtion story astonished him. In 1985, the city needed a new high school, but it couldn't afford a building big enough in town, so local leaders filled in marshland a few miles from the Boardwalk and put a new school there. Land prices weren't the only striking statistics. More than 200 restaurants, Moyers learned, had gone out of business since 1978. Before the casinos, the kitchen at Curt Kugel's Luigi's restaurant had cranked out as many as 1,000 dinners a night when the Miss America Pageant or the AFL-CIO convention came to town. After Resorts opened, Kugel's revenues fell by half. By the time Moyers spoke with him in 1986, his restaurant had been turned into a parking lot.
Taken from: Bill Moyers, "Big Gamble in Atlantic City," CBS New Special Report, July 28, 1986, Heston Room, ACFPL.
"Boardwalk of Dreams, Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban American," by Bryant Simon, pages 194-195.
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