ATLANTIC CITY — The casino era has not been exactly the golden age of architecture for Atlantic City.
One by one, the distinctive hotels and buildings of the old seashore resort were blown up or torn down, to be replaced by boxy corporate structures with glass-curtain walls at their bases or by empty lots.
The resort that built its reputation serving up an outlandish, fanciful, heaping feast for the senses began a long march in the early 1980s toward visual dullness.
Now, however, that march is headed in another direction. Architecture and urban design at last are making a comeback in the seaside playground. The city's new look is a whimsical combination of seashore-meets-kitsch and art-deco-meets-Disney.
The center of town is dominated by a dramatically lighted boulevard leading from the new Convention Center to a 90-foot decorative lighthouse that shoots lasers from its perch amid a faux jetty and boardwalk. Atlantic Avenue is home to new civic and commercial buildings, including a deco-inspired bus station and a steam plant disguised with a funky postmodern facade. New casino construction has injected scenes of ancient Rome and the Wild West on the Boardwalk and even on Pacific Avenue. The skyline includes the classical lines of the new, 26-story Caesar's Tower.
Although some critics say the continuing makeover has been too timid and is still a generation behind Las Vegas, there is at least a lot to catch the eye in Atlantic City again.
The next changes may be to the fabled Boardwalk. Last week, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority hired renowned architect Jon Jerde, creator of cutting-edge entertainment and retail spaces from Taipei to Las Vegas to Bloomington, Minn., to study a possible makeover. The authority has spurred much of the new development in town, doling out hundreds of millions of dollars from a dedicated casino tax.
``The face of the city is changing,'' says architect Martin Blumberg, designer of the new mall-like high school and the nearly finished Ocean Life Center at historic Gardner's Basin, a gracious building that evokes an airy beach house of an earlier time. ``It's being renewed and is certainly leaving a much more positive impression.''
Even the Gulf station at the center of town has been given a catchy, wavy neon canopy that in some ways is as interesting as the lighthouse that is the centerpiece of the $88 million Grand Boulevard entryway.
