So far, and it's early, no official Nucky tour has emerged. To help matters along, we offer our own best Nucky Tour, a fanciful trip through the world of Boardwalk Empire as it exists - or no longer exists, or, perhaps, never existed - in current-day Atlantic City.
1. Incubator Babies walk among us. One of the signature pieces of the faux Boardwalk set HBO constructed in Brooklyn is the Incubator Baby store. Nucky Thompson is drawn there in melancholy reverie, a place where for 25 cents you can see actual premature babies in actual, and recently invented, incubators.
Sounds crazy, no?
Well, the beauty of Atlantic City - then and now - is how the weird is intricately woven into the normal. There really were incubator babies. If you start your in-search-of-Nucky-tour in Ventnor, at the law offices of Frank J. Ferry on Atlantic Avenue, you can find one in pink-clad secretary Carol-Anne Heinisch, 68.
She was an incubator baby on the Boardwalk (in the summer of 1942). A preemie, she spent two months inside the storefront across from the Million Dollar Pier (now Caesars) set up by the inventor of the incubators, in part to raise money, in part to show off his invention, and in part to expose the fragile newborns to the healing effects of the salt air. (They kept the windows open.) "It didn't bother me," says Heinisch. "What did I know?"
2. Notes from Nucky. Heinisch's boss, Ferry, almost 80, was an acquaintance of Nucky's and did legal work for him. He's written a biography of Johnson and has an album full of Johnson's scribbled notes. While hard to read, they paint a picture of the real Johnson's mind at work, always dashing off instructions. ("Important that arrangements made for firemen to be relieved on election day . . .")
