were routinely set in a style comparable to today’s classified ads: five or six lines, in modest type, under the heading “resorts” was the conventional practice of the staid Victorian era. McGlade ignored convention. He shouted his message using eye-catching bold print ads in the major Northeastern newspapers. It worked and his competitors soon followed his example, creating a revolution in hotel advertising.
The master of the Mansion House was responsible for innovations that went beyond advertising. Prior to McGlade, most of the town’s hotels and boardinghouses were sparsely furnished, creating a sober, almost spartanlike environment—what one might expect to find on a religious retreat. McGlade brought creature comforts to Atlantic City, which local hoteliers hadn’t considered worth the investment for businesses operating only during the summer season. The first thing he did was to transform the “parlor” into a sophisticated hotel lobby. Bare walls and sparse furnishings gave way to frescoed ceilings of flowers and figures painted by local artist, Jerre Leeds.
McGlade created an aura of glamour. He installed elegant carpeting, expensive wallpaper, cushioned lounge chairs, crystal chandeliers, polished glass, and mahogany paneling. The bare walls and stiff furniture of McGlade’s competitors soon gave way to a whole line of improvements that transformed the resort hotel industry. “The bar, a principal part of all successful hotel operations, was transformed from a saloon to salon” and became a popular meeting place for visitors from the other hotels and boardinghouses. He also installed an outdoor dance pavilion, permitting guests to enjoy the open air rather than a hot dining room, which is where his competitors permitted dancing. More importantly, McGlade set a standard for entertaining his customers that soon became an Atlantic City trademark. He arranged for his guests to be met at the train station by an elegant horse-drawn carriage and had them transported to his hotel where he would personally greet them. He oversaw every service offered his patrons and made them feel as if they were personal guests. Upon their departure, he was there to wish them farewell with “Hope you will return again soon.” McGlade set the standard for hospitality. Other hoteliers followed his example. One such hotel pioneer was Josiah White, who started a resort dynasty.
Josiah White III was the great grand-nephew of Josiah White, a Pennsylvania pioneer who had constructed the Lehigh Canal. The Whites were eager to become involved in new businesses in Pennsylvania, much the same way the Richards family did in southern New Jersey. Josiah White could see that Atlantic City was Philadelphia’s playground and in 1887, he purchased the Luray Hotel, a 90-room boardinghouse on Kentucky Avenue near the beach. He quickly acquired the land between the Luray and the ocean and, with his sons, John and Allen, expanded the Luray into a hotel of more than 300 rooms. White and his sons built stores along the Boardwalk and erected the resort’s first hotel sundeck. The Whites added another first, hot and cold running seawater for those rooms that had private baths.
From the success with the Luray, White and his sons purchased a nearby property used for retreats by the Academy of the Sacred Heart. In 1902, the Whites erected the Marlborough House. A short time later, the Luray was destroyed by fire. Rather than rebuild, White and his sons acquired additional property near the Marlborough and constructed the Blenheim Hotel. It was one of the first fireproof hotels in Atlantic City and the first hotel with a private bath for every room, something unheard of in the hotel industry. Another first of the Blenheim was that it was constructed of reinforced concrete. It was a new process and its inventor, Thomas Edison, was on hand to supervise the construction.
The Whites’ hotels, together with several other large hotels that followed them, created a magical aura along the Boardwalk. They were magnificent sand castles that captured the public’s attention and enhanced Atlantic City’s reputation. The Marlborough, named after the home of the Prince of Wales, was built in the Queen Anne style of architecture. The Blenheim, named after the Blenheim Castle, home of the Duke of Marlborough, was designed in a Spanish-Moorish architecture. While most of Atlantic City’s visitors could never afford to stay at the Marlborough- Blenheim, the Whites’ properties set a tone of elegance adding to the illusion of Atlantic City and its Boardwalk.
Through the leadership of hoteliers such as Benjamin Brown, Charles McGlade, and the Whites, Atlantic City’s hospitality industry gained a reputation as a destination where the vacationer could count on being treated well. They set the standard for the entire hospitality industry, including the smaller hotels and boardinghouses. Regardless of their financial means, upon arrival in Atlantic City, guests knew they would be fussed over. But the pampering of hotel guests—especially before modern conveniences—was labor intensive. The resort’s hotel industry couldn’t function without large numbers of unskilled workers. Cooks, waiters, chambermaids, dishwashers, bellboys, and janitors were in constant demand. These jobs were filled almost entirely by freed slaves and their descendants who had migrated north following the Civil War. These African-Americans were essential to Atlantic City’s surge to prominence as a destination for vacationers. While the money to build a national resort came primarily from Philadelphia and New York investors, the muscle and sweat needed to keep things going was furnished by Black workers, lured north in hope of a better life.
3
A Plantation by the Sea
“Elegant” was a word often used to describe the Windsor Hotel. In the late 1800s, it was one of Atlantic City’s most talked about places. Originally built in 1884 as a small boardinghouse called the Mineola, it was combined with the Berkely Hotel several years later under the name “the Windsor.” The Windsor was a tony place. A small hotel, noted for its service, it had the city’s first French-style courtyard and was a center of social life year-round.
Until the summer of 1893, everyone at the Windsor understood their place in resort society. That June saw the first effort by hotel workers to stage a strike. It failed miserably.
Unhappy with the meal he had been given during break time, a Black waiter in the Windsor’s dining room placed an order with the kitchen for himself. When the White headwaiter learned that the meal was for one of his Black staff, the meal was canceled. The workers were told that if they wanted to eat, they could do so in the Black-only help’s dining area, which was off to one side in the kitchen. At the next dinner break, the food was inedible. The waiters refused their meals and politely advised the headwaiter they would strike if they didn’t receive better food. The headwaiter was unfazed by the threat. He… cooly told them to strike out for another job and summoned all the chambermaids attired in their knobby white caps and aprons to wait at supper and the next morning he had a new force of colored waiters.
Typical of the era, the name of the waiter who led the strike remains unknown. To White society, African-Americans, generally, were anonymous. As for the meal that prompted a strike by workers accustomed to third-rate treatment, one can only imagine how putrid it was. White hoteliers viewed Blacks as little more than beasts of burden. They were brought to town in much the same way Northern farmers recruited migrant farm hands. Any worker who questioned a hotel’s rules was replaced.
As Cape May had done years earlier, Atlantic City’s hotels reached out to the Upper South for domestic servants. In a short time, the resort became a mecca for Black men and women as hotel workers. Between the years 1870 and 1915, thousands of Blacks left their homes in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina and ventured to Atlantic City in search of opportunity. By 1915, African-Americans accounted for more than 27 percent of the resort’s population, a percentage more than five times that of any other northern city. At the same time, they comprised 95 percent of the hotel workforce. And with the treatment they received, Atlantic City’s hotel industry was akin to a plantation.
Atlantic City’s evolution into a plantation by the sea is a product of its unique status in the era in which it was growing from a beach village to a major resort. For nearly three generations after the Civil War, as America was shifting from an agricultural-based economy to a manufacturing economy, racial prejudice excluded Blacks from industrial employment. During the years between the American Civil War and World War II, the only occupations realistically available to Black Americans were either as a farm laborer or domestic worker. Domestic work was
