Posts in category: Amusement Parks

Of all the Jersey Shore towns, Atlantic City is unique. It has casino gambling, big glitzy hotels, top-name entertainment and never-ending nightlife. You may also know AC for its crime and its rougher side.

As you drive through Atlantic City, before you get to the boardwalk and the casinos or drive from there to the casinos on the Bayfront, you see some pretty rough neighborhoods.

But underneath all that, it’s still a Jersey Shore town.

Atlantic City has great mom-and-pop restaurants, family-run stores and businesses, hotels and condos and great residential areas.

Yes, great residential areas — if you go to the very north end of the city by the inlet, past the Absecon lighthouse.

Yes, Atlantic City has a lighthouse. You will also find some spectacular homes in the Inlet neighborhood.

If you take exit 2 of the Atlantic City Expressway, before entering the center of town, you’ll be on Route 40, the old Blackhorse Pike.

That turns into Albany Avenue and if you make a right, you are in what is known as Lower Chelsea.

You could be in Spring Lake, Avon, Loveladies, or Deal for that matter. You’ll find quiet streets with large majestic old Jersey Shore three-story houses and great people.

One of the best features of this part of town is that the beaches are less crowded and best of all, yes, they are free.

Stockton University built a new campus right on the boardwalk just south of Albany Avenue. For the next 12 blocks, you’ll find less crowded beaches and more of a residential local crowd.

There’s also ample parking at the lot just south of the college and the Stockton three-story parking lot is open to the public, as well. That section of the city adjoins the town of Ventnor which leads into the towns of Margate and Longport — which are distinctly different from what you find on the main strip of Atlantic City.

All those towns, including Atlantic City, are part of what is Absecon Island.

If you’re looking to find a new Jersey Shore spot to enjoy this summer, you might want to check out North Beach and Lower Chelsea.

For breakfast and lunch check out Brittany‘s Café. If you want drinks and a great meal at a waterfront bar, go to the Wonder Bar. Dine like a local for dinner, check out Scannicchio’s at Lefty’s Bar. You’re welcome!

The Atlantic City you probably don’t know

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Dennis Malloy only.

You can now listen to Dennis & Judi — On Demand! Hear New Jersey’s favorite best friends anytime, anywhere and any day of the week. Download the Dennis & Judi show wherever you get podcasts, on our free app, or listen right now.

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Cape May, NJ: 15 wonderful places to visit

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. – Some cities around the world are pulling back from shorelines, as rising seas from climate change increase flooding. But so far, retreat appears out of the question for Atlantic City, New Jersey.

The breezy getaway town is on the water on a barrier, which was once reachable only by boat but in modern times via a causeway. The city fully occupies a small piece of land, water on either side, just above sea level.

“We love our residents,” said Barbara Woolley-Dillon, former Atlantic City Planning and Development Director. “We have one of the most diverse populations… it’s a great place to be, and we have such a thriving community that we want to do everything we can to keep it intact.”

There is no obvious place for 38,500 residents, about 33% Black, to go. The city, popular with vacation goers in the Eastern U.S., particularly in the summer, brings in billions of dollars in revenue, another incentive to keep it intact as long as possible.

“Atlantic City is a seven billion dollar a year economic engine” that benefits all of southern New Jersey and must be maintained, said Jim Rutala, an Atlantic City planning contractor.

Still, the flooding is getting deeper and more frequent. In 1910, researchers installed a tide gauge at the end of Steel Pier Amusement Park. The gauge shows the sea has risen a foot and a half since then, more than double the global mean sea level rise.

City leaders have no plans to take state offers to buy and demolish homes in flood-prone areas, according to Rutala.

Instead, officials are spending $100 million, from 2016 through next year, to “fortify and armor” the city from rising sea levels by installing sea walls, pump stations and bulkheads, according to Rutala. Unseen by most tourists, a newly built pump station in Fisherman’s Park pushes ocean water that has come ashore back into the bay. It is common to hear construction crews at work building structures with entrances elevated to strict new height requirements.

Other cities in New Jersey have taken a different route to confront flooding. In Woodbridge, about 100 miles north of Atlantic City, in recent years the state has bought and torn down more than 150 homes to remove people and property from the danger of future floods.

In Atlantic City, tourists and residents walk along street names that inspired the Monopoly board game, such as Baltic Avenue and Park Place. Casinos pull in people hoping to win big at the poker table or slot machines. And outside are wide-open beaches and boardwalk amusement park rides.

Twenty-seven million people visit the resort town annually. For some, it’s a place to escape from their daily lives. For others, it’s a way to live a simple life by the ocean.

For many residents, it’s unbearable to contemplate a future without the city.

“This part of Atlantic City is just very tightly knit and we are a nice little neighborhood,” said elementary school teacher Abby Moul, 47, as she played with her dog in the north part of the island. “It is kind off the beaten path and that’s what I love about it.”

Under current projections for global emissions, Rutgers University estimates that New Jersey is likely to experience another one to three feet of sea level rise between now and 2070, according to Robert Kopp, Rutgers climate scientist. And the land here is sinking from what scientists call the “see-saw” effect of melting glaciers much further north.

It’s unclear if the city’s new fortification projects will be enough to confront the projected sea level rise. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that New Jersey’s 950 square miles of beaches and back bays will sustain more than a billion dollars in annual flooding damage in a few years.

Atlantic City is the one of the poorest and most densely populated part of the New Jersey coastline. More than two dozen different languages are spoken in city schools.

Many people here have what locals call “back-of-the-house” jobs at one of the nine casinos, preparing food, cleaning rooms and other work.

It can cost $150,000 in the denser, older parts of the city to raise up an $80,000 home to protect it from “nuisance” flooding, periodic flooding, sometimes from high tides or backed up drainage systems. That cost is simply out of reach for many.

On a recent afternoon, lifelong Atlantic City resident Zakiy Abdullah, 45, a forklift operator, did his best to keep his three-year-old daughter Jamaarah Wells from riding her tricycle through flood waters in the street.

“Flooding it is a constant problem,” said Abdullah. “As you can see, the water has not evaporated from the other night.”

Kimberly McKenna, of the Stockton University Coastal Research Center, says most of the increased flooding in Atlantic City happens in the part of the island that faces the mainland, called the back bay. That also happens to be where many people live in poverty.

Residents often move their cars to higher ground during high tides and full moons.

“Those floods, what we may now call nuisance flooding, will turn into regular flooding,” said McKenna. “And that’s going to be persistent flooding. People won’t be moving their cars. They will be moving their homes.”

Local coastal governments like Atlantic City will have to decide whether to manage a retreat from the coastline over several years, or to stay and only leave when and if the flood waters become unlivable.

“You don’t need to give up a community right now because of the risk of three or five feet of sea level rise,” said Kopp, the Rutgers climate scientist. “But you need to think about how redevelopment plans you are making today will fare in the future. There is no simple solution.”

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Ronald Filson, a Yale-trained architect whose career included three years in the Algerian desert, 12 years as dean of Tulane University’s School of Architecture and a standoff with Donald Trump, died Sunday of a heart attack in White River Junction, Vermont, while attending a Yale reunion conference, said his wife, Lea Sinclair Filson. He was 75.

When Filson started at Tulane in 1980, he was 33 years old, one of the youngest deans in the country, said Errol Barron, a professor emeritus of architecture at Tulane: “He was a kid. He charmed the pants off everybody because he was full of energy and enthusiasm. … He pumped life into the school. He brought in all these young people. They energized the school.”

He was happy running a school where the lights were on day and night as students worked on their projects.

“The long hours and hard work breed a feeling of camaraderie among the architecture students, and they stick together,” Filson said in the 1981 Jambalaya, Tulane’s yearbook. “They feel like one big family — like most families, happy at times and unhappy at others. “

Filson said he hadn’t expected an academic career, but it was something for which he had been preparing for years. When he was an undergraduate at Yale, he was a teaching assistant to Charles Moore, the architecture dean who known in New Orleans for creating Piazza d’Italia and the Wonderwall at the 1984 world’s fair.

In 1974, he was recruited to teach at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he became assistant dean of the architecture school and directed the Urban Innovations Group.

Six years later, Tulane offered him the architecture deanship. “He ate the job up,” said Barron, who chaired the search committee. “He put Tulane on the map.”

Studied in Rome

Born in Chardon, Ohio, Filson said he knew when he was 6 that he wanted to be an architect. While an undergraduate at Yale, he and Dan Scully, a fellow student, won a Rome Prize to underwrite a year of study at the American Academy, a private arts and research institution in Rome.

After completing his degree at Yale, he was offered a job to restore the legendary Casbah of Algiers. But by the time he got to Africa, he said in an oral history on the 50th anniversary of Yale architecture’s Class of 1970, the 17th century citadel wasn’t ready for work yet. So he was sent to the M’Zab Valley, a 10th century village that is a UNESCO World Heritage Center, which he described as “an incredibly dusty little Sahara Desert town.”

He wound up spending three years in Algeria, half of that time in the valley. The work, which, he said, consisted of restorations and “designing new stuff,” was “a really wacky job.”

The Trump connection

For the next two decades, Filson was an academic. After stepping down from the Tulane deanship, Filson set up an architectural practice. Among the people he encountered in the mid-1990s was a go-getting New York City real estate developer named Donald Trump, who was heavily involved with casinos and opulent hotels and apartment complexes.

The two men when Filson went to Gulfport, Mississippi, to discuss his proposal for a master plan for the Marine Life park there. Trump, who was there because of his interest in the Marine Life project and casinos on the Gulf Coast, told Filson, “I like the presentation. I have some other projects I’d like to talk to you about,” according to Filson.

Trump invited him to fly that night on his private jet to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where Trump said he wanted to renovate the Steel Pier, an amusement park that had seen better days.

‘We’re stopping work’

“He was fishing for free proposals,” said Filson, who knew of Trump’s reputation for short-changing people who worked for him.

As for the Marine Life project, Filson said, “The longer we worked on it, the worse it got, probably because of Trump’s involvement and trying to keep changing things.”

At one presentation that included an architectural model, Trump ripped off both of Filson’s models for entry pavilions. “I realized he was pulling out of the project,’ Filson said.

By then, Filson had had enough.

“I made it clear that if we weren’t paid within five days of the invoice, we’re stopping work,” he said. “He understood, and I got paid all the way through.”

Filson was president of the Arts Council of New Orleans, a member of the Contemporary Arts Center board and the city Planning Commission.

Filson and Lea Sinclair, whom he married in 1999, shuttled for several years between New Orleans and Ohio, where he renovated the family farmhouse. Then they moved to Plymouth, Massachusetts, which was fitting for his wife was governor general of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants.

Survivors include his wife, Lea Sinclair Filson; a daughter, Lily Virginia Filson; and a grandchild. His first marriage, to Susan Virginia Saward, ended in divorce; she lives in New Orleans.

Funeral arrangements were incomplete Tuesday, but Lea Filson said a memorial service will be held in New Orleans.

This article is a joint publication of The American Prospect and Workday Magazine, a nonprofit newsroom devoted to holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers.

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) presents itself as the nonpartisan “voice of small business.” Yet it has a track record of overwhelmingly supporting conservative causes, and has taken millions from right-wing groups. Over the past year, the trade association has teamed up with a bevy of companies to lobby for state-level bills to erode child labor protections, citing the “labor shortage” as justification.

The bills—in Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Jersey—have all been aimed at expanding the number of hours teenagers are allowed to work, despite evidence that too many hours can harm children. A 2011 study published in the journal Child Development found that teenagers who work more than 20 hours per week during the school year may, as a result, face poorer school performance and loss of interest in class, alongside behavioral problems.

More from Sarah Lazare

While NFIB is not the only entity pushing for these bills, its involvement is eye-catching, given the trade association’s reputation. NFIB, whose sticker you can see displayed in numerous small-business establishments, uses its mom-and-pop image to advocate for policies that benefit corporate America. “They have a long history of manipulating data to push a far-right, anti-regulatory agenda,” Rick Perlstein, historian and author of a book about the United States’ right turn in the 1970s, told Workday Magazine and the Prospect.

IN OCTOBER 2021, Ohio lawmakers from both parties introduced a bill to allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work until 9:00 p.m. on a school night, if they receive permission from a parent or legal guardian.

If passed, the legislation will apply to employers who are not covered by the federal labor law known as the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a list that includes certain small businesses that don’t engage in interstate commerce. The FLSA says that children under 16 must stop working at 7:00 p.m. during the school year, two hours earlier than the proposed Ohio law. Where state labor law conflicts with federal labor law, whichever is more protective of workers reigns.

However, Ohio lawmakers are attempting to use the proposed state law to roll back child labor protections for the entire country. A concurrent resolution that is tied to the legislation calls on the U.S. Congress to bring the FLSA in line with the looser rules proposed for Ohio.

On December 15, 2021, NFIB submitted testimony in support of the effort, arguing that the proposed change “well positions Ohio if and when Congress makes a change to the Fair Labor Standards Act.”

NFIB cited the labor shortage as justification for the changes. “Our members’ inability to fill workplace vacancies has catapulted to the top concern currently facing the success of their businesses.”

Yet NFIB’s agitation against labor protections far predates the present-day labor market reality. The organization, for example, was a supporter of the effort to use the Supreme Court to gut public-sector unions, resulting in the 2018 Janus ruling.

Ohio lawmakers are attempting to use the proposed state law to roll back child labor protections for the entire country.

According to Perlstein, NFIB “masquerades as this organization of small businesses, but it grew into an organization that used the illusion they represent all American small businesses to create this battering ram.” Two laws were in NFIB’s crosshairs specifically: the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. “Between 1970 and 1979,” Perlstein said, “the members of NFIB grew from 300 to 600,000, because they became this kind of vector for pushing back against regulations and labor protections.”

Along with NFIB, the effort in Ohio has significant support from the business community. In testimony submitted on December 15, 2021, Todd Bowen, representing the Ohio Restaurant Association, made the case that working longer hours is good for teenagers because it saves them from screen time. “Employment opportunities, especially in sectors like foodservice and retail, where young people learn the incredibly important skill of customer service and interaction with the public will benefit them in their schooling and in their future career.”

In reality, these industries are rife with abuse and wage theft. A September 2021 report by One Fair Wage and the Food Labor Research Center of UC Berkeley found that more than one-third of tipped workers make below their state’s minimum wage, and tipped workers say harassment and customer hostility have worsened during the pandemic.

The Ohio bill is strikingly similar to one that recently passed the state legislature in Wisconsin, though the Wisconsin measure was vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers in February. It would have permitted 14- and 15-year-olds to work as late as 9:30 p.m. on a school night, and until 11:00 p.m. when they don’t have class the following day. The legislation also would have applied to employers who are not covered by the FLSA.

NFIB was among the Wisconsin legislation’s powerful supporters. State lobbying records show that the organization registered its support for the bill on September 27, 2021, alongside entities like the Wisconsin Hotel and Lodging Association and the Association of Wisconsin Tourism Attractions.

The Wisconsin AFL-CIO opposed the measure, with Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Stephanie Bloomingdale saying last year that “if this bill affects one child—that is one child too many.”

Laura Dresser, a labor economist and associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a progressive policy organization, told Workday Magazine and the Prospect that the push to erode child labor protections is “less about getting people to pack groceries at 9:00 at night, and more about using every chance you have to use the labor shortage to make an argument to take away regulation.”

“The floor is about wage standards, protecting child labor, protecting health and safety,” she added. “It strikes me that these coordinated approaches are about tearing down the standards that we have.”

While the Wisconsin governor’s veto has blocked the bill for now, Evers is up for re-election in November, and a new governor could permit such a bill to sail through. Evers’s opponent, Tim Michels, is endorsed by former President Trump.

An effort to pass similar legislation in New Jersey was successful on July 5, when Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law a measure that permits 16- and 17-year-olds to work as much as 50 hours a week when they are not in school, and allows 14- and 15-year-olds to work as many as 40 hours during the summer months. The bill makes permanent a more temporary extension that expired last year, and also makes it easier for teenagers to obtain work permits.

Unlike the laws in Wisconsin and Ohio, the New Jersey bill does not go beyond what’s permitted in the FLSA. Rather, it rolls back New Jersey’s youth employment laws, which had previously been more protective.

As in the other states, NFIB lobbied for the measure, with the organization’s state director, Eileen Kean, testifying “in favor of the bill because it may provide some relief to members struggling to hire for the summer months,” according to a June statement from the group.

NFIB was joined by powerful business interests, like the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, and the amusement park company Six Flags Great Adventure.

It is not immediately clear what, if any, role NFIB is playing coordinating, or promoting communication between, these state-level efforts, and the group did not reply to a request for comment. But the involvement of a national trade association, alongside a spate of companies, raises questions about a broader campaign, particularly in light of NFIB’s conservative history.

NFIB WAS ESTABLISHED IN 1943. It claims to represent “hundreds of thousands of small and independent business owners across America,” and is active in all 50 states. The research organization Open Secrets found that, for the 2022 cycle, 98.2 percent of congressional candidates who received money from NFIB were Republicans, while just 1.8 percent were Democrats. This places NFIB to the right of the U.S. small-business owners it claims to represent.

NFIB has taken up a number of causes célèbres for conservatives, including opposition to the Affordable Care Act. In 2012, the organization waged a lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services seeking to overturn the legislation. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which took the side of the Obama administration on one aspect, but which also led to states having to opt in to the Medicaid expansion, something which 12 states have still refused to do, leaving millions of Americans without an affordable option for health insurance.

The organization was a strong supporter of conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, and claims credit for helping ensure that Democratic Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland never got so much as a hearing. It has pushed for a host of tax cuts for the wealthy, and lobbied against increases to corporate tax rates. Former President Donald Trump spoke at NFIB’s 75th Anniversary and Fly-In in 2018, proclaiming, “For many years, Washington tried to hold you back.”

“Contributions to the NFIB network of nonprofits over the last 6 years are difficult to track because the organizations do not disclose their funding sources or, in the case of the trade association NFIB, its members,” David Armiak, the research director for the Center for Media and Democracy, told Workday Magazine and the Prospect over email. “And the contributors that are identifiable, like The 85 Fund and DonorsTrust, are conduits for donors who wish to remain anonymous.”

The trade association declined to answer requests for information about where it gets its money. The organization does take dues from members, though it does not publicly provide a full list of who these members are.

Labor activists argue that employers have other options for attracting workers—for example, raising wages and improving conditions.

In the past, however, some donations have been unearthed. Roughly a decade ago, it was revealed that NFIB had received $3.7 million from Crossroads GPS, which was co-founded by the conservative consultant and lobbyist Karl Rove. Around the same time, NFIB also received $2.5 million from groups affiliated with the Koch network, The Washington Post reported.

There are signs, meanwhile, that NFIB continues to move within this ecosystem of conservative organizations. As recently as September of 2019, NFIB co-hosted a roundtable on “Business Tax Relief” with the New Hampshire branch of Americans for Prosperity, a central player in the Koch network. AFP has engaged in extensive political advocacy aimed at gutting public programs, including Medicaid, and was one of the organizations that agitated against the temporary work closures that were aimed at protecting public health during the early phases of the pandemic.

NFIB IS NOT THE ONLY CONSERVATIVE ORGANIZATION to push back against child labor protections in recent years. The Acton Institute, a think tank that has received funding from billionaire Betsy DeVos, the education secretary under former President Trump, garnered headlines in 2016 when it published a blog post headlined “Work is a gift our kids can handle.” DeVos served on the board of the organization from 1995 to 2005.

NFIB’s present-day anti-regulatory push threatens some of the most vulnerable U.S. workers.

The negative health consequences of child labor are well established. In one 2019 paper published in the Journal of Public Health, researchers found that, in lower- and middle-income countries, child labor (defined as 18 or younger) is associated with “poor growth, malnutrition, higher incidence of infectious and system-specific diseases, behavioral and emotional disorders, and decreased coping efficacy.”

“The general purposes behind child labor laws—to keep children safe, to provide children with time for meaningful educational opportunities, and to promote children’s well-being—must not be forgotten,” Kate Griffith, professor at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, told Workday Magazine and the Prospect over email. “They were important a hundred years ago when these laws started to proliferate, and they are still important today.”

State legislators are pushing to loosen child labor laws at a time when a key federal anti-poverty program for children has dried up. The Child Tax Credit, in which the Internal Revenue Service disbursed payments of $250 to $300 per child to 36 million homes, stopped at the end of 2021, and Congress declined to renew it. The expiration threw 3.7 million children into poverty, according to a study from Columbia University, spiking the child poverty rate from 12.1 percent in December 2021 to 17 percent in January 2022.

There are signs that more teenagers are working. The summer of 2021 saw the highest level of teen employment since 2008, at a rate of 32 percent. And as Indigo Olivier pointed out in The Conversationalist, some businesses, like McDonald’s, have been aggressively recruiting 14- and 15-year-olds.

Instead of expanding labor hours for children, labor activists argue that employers have other options for attracting workers—for example, raising wages and improving conditions.

Toward this end, Peter Rickman, president of the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Organization, said that politicians should withstand pressures from groups like NFIB and pursue policies that strengthen, rather than erode, labor standards.

“Policymakers should skip doing the bidding of the boss class, and employers who’ve failed to provide good, family-supporting employment,” he said. “And they should focus on making this labor market work to support good, living-wage, union jobs.”