Metropolitan Philadelphia by Steven Conn

Author:Steven Conn [Conn, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Urban, Political Science, Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development
ISBN: 9780812204087
Google: UWQUBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2013-02-12T04:24:36+00:00

Fig. 16. For the earliest vacationers who went down the shore, Cape May looked like this. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

In fact, Atlantic City first and foremost, but other shore towns as well, evolved into epicenters of the kind of urban recreation and entertainment represented by places like Coney Island. Every day of the week was the weekend along Atlantic City’s boardwalk, the first and best along the shore. Amusement park rides, theater and movie shows, arcade games—all these were staples of city life by the first quarter of the twentieth century. Not only were they common to American cities, but as David Nasaw has argued, they were places where the working class and the middle class mixed and shared cultural experiences.30 Philadelphians thus found in Atlantic City versions of the things they already enjoyed back home, only more so. All that and the ocean too.

Surely because Atlantic City stood in the American imagination as the preeminent example of the middle-class resort town by the early twentieth century, it was chosen to play host to the annual event to define the paragon of American womanhood: the Miss America Pageant. The Miss America Pageant, at least in its heyday, combined, however hypocritically, the salaciousness of the beach experience itself—beautiful women in revealing bathing suits—with all the middle-class virtues of female submissiveness and domesticity. In this way, Atlantic City became the showplace for an American middle-class ideal, and the Miss America Pageant became yet another way in which metropolitan Philadelphia shaped the culture of middle-class expectations.

The arrival of the automobile age reshaped the Jersey Shore in a number of ways. Most importantly it enabled vacationers to come in much larger numbers. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the worst traffic in the entire Greater Philadelphia region is that between the city and the shore. And it brought to an end the railroad service from Philadelphia. Only Atlantic City remains connected with Philadelphia via train. It brought to an end as well the era of the grand resort hotels which were replaced in part by a new generation of cheaper motels, a few classic examples of which remain up and down the coast. The best, at least according the connoisseurs, are to be found in Wildwood.

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