Reconciling the Boardwalk and the Midway

Despite differences in appearance, demographics, and forms of entertainment, at their height, both the Boardwalk and the Midway, “functioned as instruments of the mass consumption of culture, and provided a… stage on which the obscure and famous could share the same experience.”[1] However, it cannot be forgotten that the “culture” and “stage” of Atlantic City were largely inequitable by design, as their appropriative entertainments effectively reinforced hegemonic racial hierarchies and social practices.

On the Boardwalk, white middle-class visitors could pretend to climb the social ladder and imitate the rich by practicing rules of cosmopolitan respectability and engaging in acts of conspicuous consumption. The dozens of Boardwalk attractions and sideshows affirmed and bolstered this sense of social superiority by leveraging racially and ethnically appropriative content that reinforced such differences. 

Experiences in the Midway were, in some respects, the opposite of those on the Boardwalk yet managed to produce similar effects. Drawn especially to the Northside's risqué nightclubs and bars, white tourists left behind the world of polite decorum and sought what they imagined to be "authentic" interactions with primitive, exotic entertainments. Often, such shows not only appropriated ethnic and racial stereotypes but also erased the ethnic identity of African American performers themselves, all of which made evident the events' inauthenticity and underscored larger racial and social differences. 

Indeed, patrons on the Boardwalk and in the Midway entered into a complex socio-racial paradigm that temporarily subverted common modes of self-expression and accepted degrees of interracial interaction. This investigation of appropriative entertainment revealed conflated and interwoven narratives of racial identity, moral fluidity, and cultural geography. However, when considering the ephemerality of a night's performances or a family's vacation, it is difficult to evaluate which vision of Atlantic City, or any other similar resort, was truly "authentic."


[1] Sears, “‘Doing’ Niagara Falls in the Nineteenth Century,” 27. 

Reconciling the Boardwalk and the Midway