Garden Pier wasn’t the first pier in Atlantic City, nor is it one of the largest. But it’s one of the longest-lived structures on the island, and certainly one of the most beloved.
   
Louis and Alfred Burk, who made their money in meatpacking in Philadelphia, spent much of 1912 building the pier, which cost $1.5 million. It opened in January 1913, when the amusement business was booming. Perched on the end the pier, the showroom—designed in the Spanish Renaissance style—could be seen from the foot of the structure, while the center was taken up by a large series of flowerbeds. These plantings gave the pier its name.  
   
In the pier’s early days, vaudeville reigned supreme. A night of entertainment could include everything from dancers and singers to comedians and animal acts. Shows such as Tobacco Road and George White Scandals were immensly popular, and luminaries such as Rudy Vallee, Willie and Eugene Howard, Ethel Barrymore and Everett Marshal thrilled thousands of visitors. Garden Pier’s theater became a stop on the Keith circuit, one of the nation’s most popular vaudeville tours.
   
Attractions also included operas, pre-Broadway shows, boxing matches, basketball games and ballroom dancing. A young Rudolph Valentino served as a dance instructor at the pier.
   
For a while, Garden Pier hosted one of the most unusual spectacles in Boardwalk history. In 1916, the Underwood Typewriter Company set up a working typewriter 1,728 times the usual size. It’s unclear today why this was considered a good idea. It weighed 14 tons, stood 18 feet high and was 21 feet wide. This giant used 9-foot-by-12-foot pieces of paper, on which were printed a variety of messages, usually welcoming various convention groups.
   
The behemoth, first displayed in 1915 at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, was dismantled and shipped to Atlantic City, where it was reassembled on Garden Pier. After several years there it moved to Convention Hall, where it remained until it was disassembled and melted down for scrap during World War II.
   
As vaudeville fell out of favor, the theater hosted concerts and other fare. The garden was replaced in the early 1930s by a large retail outlet. But the odds were stacked against Garden Pier. As the city’s center of gravity shifted toward what’s today called “Center Boardwalk,” it began to decline. Still, it was the site of some crazy stunts, like Mike Gillette’s 1932 attempt to set a flagpole-sitting record; after 54 days at the top of a 20-foot pole, he lost his grip and fell to the ground, where doctors pronounced his physical condition as “poor.”
   
The pier’s prospects were similarly dire. In July 1934, the theater closed “because of lack of patronage,” cutting short what promised to have been a thrilling summer series of operettas that started with The Chocolate Soldier. The pier continued to host conferences and other gatherings, but it was clearly having troubles; in 1937 it was auctioned off. In 1940, it fell into receivership and began to decay, and in 1944, the city acquired the property in a tax sale. A hurricane in September of that year did further damage to the property, and eventually all of the buildings were razed, leaving only the pilings and deck. After three decades, it looked like the pier was finished.
   
But historically minded members of the city administration had other ideas. A portion of city luxury taxes funded the rehabilitation of Garden Pier. Just in time for the city’s 1954 centennial celebration, it reopened with a concert stage, art gallery, and space for community groups. Weekend band concerts attracted crowds of nearly 5,000 people. The pier was back. And in a nod to the pier’s history, community members were allowed to maintain garden plots there, making it a “garden” yet again.
   
Today, the pier still hosts the Art Center as well as the Atlantic City Historical Museum. It is fitting that one of the surviving reminders of the city’s heyday now memorializes the city’s history.

By David Schwartz

David G. Schwartz (www.dieiscast.com), an Atlantic City native, is the Director of the Center for Gaming Research at UNLV and the author of several books, including Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling.

Please login to post your comments.