Atlantic City, New Jersey was not always about casinos. 
There were days in years past when The Boardwalk was the in thing to do.
Anyone that was someone important wanted to be seen at the Boardwalk. History goes back some 200 years before the casinos were allowed into the city. As a matter of fact Atlantic City was not even its real name. Early in the 1800s, it was called Absecon, and by 1850 there were only 7 homes on the island. Only one of these homes was not owned by the city’s founder, a doctor named Jonathan Pitney. He and a civil engineer named Richard Osborn decided to bring the railroad from the mainland to the island, so that they could transform the island into a health resort. The construction of the railroad began in 1852, and in 1854 the first train arrived.
The Lenni-Lenope Indians first used Absecon Island as a summer camp, indulging in the wide variety of food on the island, traveling back to the mainland in the winter time. The Indian trail that they took is near Florida Avenue.
An Englishman by the name of Thomas Budd was awarded acreage on the mainland and the island for a claim that he had won against holders of the royal grant in the 1670’s. This made him the very first recorded owner of the island. Back then his mainland property was worth forty cents an acre, and Absecon Island was only worth four cents an acre. The Island is where Atlantic City sits today and you can just imagine how much this land is worth today.
The second most important man to remember is Jeremiah Leeds, who was the first man to build a structure on the island in 1785. Later Leeds’s grandfather built a log cabin on Baltic Avenue. With the Leeds family being the first official residents of Atlantic City, they were all important members of the community itself. After Jeremiah’s death in 1838, not knowing what to do to provide for the family, Jeremiah’s wife became the first business owner in Atlantic City, of Aunt Millie’s Boarding House, where she also ran a tavern. The Leeds family contributed much to Atlantic City’s history. In 1824 , Chalkey Leeds became Atlantic City’s first mayor, and Robert B. Leeds another one of Jeremiah’s children, became the firs postmaster in 1828.
Osborn is credited for giving Atlantic City its name in 1854 as the train brought tourist’s on the Camden-Atlantic City Railroad. However, the train was not the only way of transport. Atlantic City became a busy seaport. A light house was constructed in 1854 due to the tragic shipwreck of the “Powhattan”, which left 311 German immigrants dead.
Dr. Pitney named all the streets that were running parallel to the ocean to the world’s greatest bodies of water, and the streets that ran east to west were all named after the American States. It took 17 years to complete a road from the island to the mainland, which began at Peasantville and ended in Atlantic City. In order to pay for the road, travelers were charged 30 cents as a toll charge. However, Albany Avenue was the first free road in the city.
Atlantic City had become so popular by 1878 that the railroad could not keep up with the amount of tourists visiting the city. So the “Narrow Gauge Line” to Philadelphia had to be constructed. Atlantic City’s first hotel was called the “Belloe House” and was built in 1853, at Massachusetts and Atlantic Avenue. Due to the fast growing population, buildings were being built constantly. The largest hotel in the city was “The United States Hotel”, which took up an entire city block, built between Atlantic, Pacific, Delaware, and Maryland Avenues.
In 1860 the Boardwalk was constructed to keep the sand from being trampled inside the buildings, which created a huge issue to the buildings owners. The Boardwalk has suffered many calamities over the years, however, due to hurricane in 1889, it was completely destroyed. Today the Boardwalk is back, with businesses on one side and amusements on the other.
In 1858, the first public school was opened at Maryland and Arctic Avenue. The next few decades saw the first bank open, and in 1882 Atlantic City first began using electricity. In 1883 a trolly service began, and The Atlantic City Hospital opened in 1898, and the new library opened a year later. In 1915 you could take a carriage ride around the city for an extravagant 5 cents.
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Tsunamis can strike anywhere in the world along any coastline that is off an ocean. That includes Atlantic City, USA; however, the chances are so extremely low that a “killer” tsunami would strike there, that it almost does not bear speaking of it. 