Abandoned Trump Plaza — © Brian Rose

I’ll tell you, it’s big business. If there is one word to describe Atlantic City, it’s big business. Or two words – big business.

— Donald J. Trump

Trump Plaza poking up above Boardwalk Hall — © Brian Rose

During Prohibition, Atlantic City created the idea of the speakeasy, which turned into nightclubs and that extraordinary political complexity and corruption coming out of New Jersey at the time. The long hand that they had-and maybe still do-even had to do with presidential elections.

— Martin Scorsese

Trump Plaza — © Brian Rose

Trump’s wall in Atlantic City.

(Reuben) Kramer shows us the shuttered Trump Plaza, which will likely be torn down. It is one of four casinos that closed in 2014, representing a third of Atlantic City’s gaming halls. Trump’s name has been removed from the Trump Plaza facade. Only the gaudy golden crest, a color reminiscent of Trump’s famous hair, remains.

Matt Katz, from the blog Katz on Christie

Abandoned Trump Plaza, Atlantic City — © Brian Rose

I made my second trip to Atlantic City. It was a grey, damp, December day — chilly, but not too bad. The project is beginning to take shape. I will focus, to start, on the Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Plaza, two recently bankrupted casinos that have sent this already depressed city reeling, and then gradually expand out from the Boardwalk. Is Atlantic City a metaphor for what is happening to the country as a whole? Way back in 1981, Louis Malle said that his film “Atlantic City could be a metaphor for things going wrong all over America.” And recently the New Republic opined that “The closure of Trump Taj Mahal casino is a giant metaphor for Trump’s America.” So, I think we are on solid, if not original, footing here.

Driving down on the Garden State Parkway I pulled into a rest stop for coffee, and as I was leaving I noticed Governor Chris Christie’s beaming face lurking behind a couple of coin operated games. Politico called Christie and Trump “the twin villains of Atlantic city,” and I am in constant amazement that these two buffoons have come to exercise such power. Fortunately, it appears that Christie’s path to national acclaim has fallen victim to a traffic jam in Fort Lee, an act of political vengeance stunning for its clownish and petty nature. Ah well.

“Trump and Christie have one thing in common regarding Atlantic City,” says Frank Becktel, a jitney driver and an Atlantic City loyalist suffering along with the rest of the town in its hour of
need. “They both knew how to squeeze a buck out of us and leave us for dead.”

Trump Plaza and the historic Atlantic City Convention Center — © Brian rose

In 1984 Donald Trump opened the Trump Plaza, at the time the largest casino in Atlantic City. The project was done in a partnership with Harrah’s, an experienced casino operator, and involved a great deal of debt, which Trump was forced to refinance several times.

“Early on, I took a lot of money out of the casinos with the financings and the things we do,” he said in a recent interview. “Atlantic City was a very good cash cow for me for a long time.”

When Trump Plaza closed two years ago, over a thousand people were laid off. The buildings languished, and the embarrassment of  having the Trump name in bold red letters all over exteriors prompted a lawsuit. “Last year, he sued to force the shuttered Trump Plaza to remove every reference to his name, a final pronouncement on his view of Atlantic City. The letters were removed, some carted off in a contractor’s pickup truck.”

Miss America tribute — © Brian Rose

Just in front of the Trump Plaza is a tribute to the Miss America pageant, which began in Atlantic City in 1921, and has been held, frequently, in the nearby Convention Center, now called Boardwalk Hall. Donald Trump never got his hands on Miss America, literally or figuratively — he was the owner of the Miss Universe and USA pageants for over a decade. Miss America would have been far too cerebral. When he took over Miss Universe pageant Trump said,  “They had a person that was extremely proud that a number of the women had become doctors, and I wasn’t interested.”

Atlantic City — © Brian Rose (4×5 negative)

When people show you who they are, believe them. Donald Trump made a bad gamble in my community, devastating thousands of American citizens. In his own mind, of course, he was a success. In May, Trump told the New York Times about his 25 years in Atlantic City: “The money I took out of there was incredible.”

It’s the only thing he has to say of my now-destroyed home town. He came, he took and he left. And I hate to break it to you, America — he’s not coming back for us.

— Arielle Brousse in the Washington Post

Atlantic City — © Brian Rose

Atlantic City — © Brian Rose

Home of James’
Only original
Cut-to-fit-the-mouth
Salt water taffy

Trump Taj Mahal, Atlantic City — © Brian Rose

Valerie McMorris writes in “I Was A Trump Taj Mahal Cocktail Waitress:”

Now, 26 years later, I look back and reflect on my personal journey and Trump’s promise of greatness. I see now that the opulence and glamour were all just bait. His rhetoric was supported by majestic surroundings, but they were financed through junk bonds. The profits that Donald Trump enjoyed were not reinvested in the building or the employees. They were shipped back up to the shore to Wall Street. That casino money flowed right out of Atlantic City and into the coffers of the billionaire hedge fund owners. 

Trump Taj Mahal, Atlantic City — © Brian Rose

It was Monday around noon, almost 60 degrees at the end of November, and a scattering of people strolled the boardwalk. As I stepped down to the beach across from the Trump Taj Mahal I encountered a half dozen stray cats lounging about as if they owned the place. And in a sense they did. The Boardwalk Cats Project feeds and tends the 150 or so spayed and neutered cats. Atlantic City may be bankrupt along with many of its casinos, but the cats are doing fine.

Trump Taj Mahal — © Brian Rose

A wall with a discreet no trespassing sign blocks passage to a stairway into the now abandoned Trump realm.

Revel, Atlantic City — © Brian Riose

On the north end of the Boardwalk just beyond the abandoned Trump Taj Mahal, Governor Chris Christie’s tax payer supported mega project.

Washington Post:

Two years later, the Revel is shuttered — wiping out thousands of jobs amid an economic implosion of the gambling industry here. Rather than serve as a shining example of Christie’s economic stewardship, Revel now stands as a 57-story example of failure in a city that has bedeviled New Jersey governors for decades.

Revel, Atlantic City — © Brian Rose

There is a party, everyone is there.
Everyone will leave at exactly the same time.
Its hard to imagine that nothing at all
Could be so exciting, and so much fun.

Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.
Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.

— Talking Heads

Revel, Atlantic City — © Brian Rose

Parking garage and drifting sand.

Trump Taj Mahal, Atlantic City — © Brian Rose

The bankrupt Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. Closed in October 2016. The beginning of a new series of photographs.

Chicago Tribune:

The closure of the sprawling Boardwalk casino, with its soaring domes, minarets and towers built to mimic the famed Indian historic site, cost nearly 3,000 workers their jobs, bringing the total jobs lost by Atlantic City casino closings to 11,000 since 2014. Atlantic City now has seven casinos.

Bruton Parish Church, Williamsburg, Virginia — © Brian Rose

Although I tend to keep politics in the background on this blog, there are times when the background and the foreground collapse into one another and it becomes impossible to separate them. So, I’d like to address the question of the appropriateness of the cast of Hamilton confronting the Vice President elect — who was attending the show — with a statement expressing their concerns about the incoming Trump administration.

Let me share a story from 1967 when I was 13 years old.

President Lyndon Johnson was in Williamsburg, Virginia to address a group of Washington journalists of the Gridiron Club. It was a roast much like the White House Correspondents Dinner, and there were the usual rhetorical jabs directed at the President amid the clubby conviviality between the press and the powers-at-be. I performed at the event as a member of the Colonial Williamsburg Fife and Drum Corps, and I remember vividly how the jokey bonhomie that evening clashed with the reality outside of constant protests against a never-ending war, and Walter Cronkite intoning the latest daily casualty figures on the evening news.

The next morning Johnson attended the Bruton Parish Church, an Episcopalian church presided over by the Reverend Cotesworth Pinkney Lewis, an eloquent, sometimes melodramatic, speaker
originally from Birmingham, Alabama. I was there with my parents as Lewis mounted the pulpit high above the congregation and directed his sermon at the President of the United States sitting just below. His remarks were respectful in tone, but the message was blunt: “there is a rather general consensus that what we are doing in Vietnam is wrong.” Lewis asked why the war continued to drag on and why there did not seem to be a concerted effort to end it.

Johnson, of course, was a captive audience to Lewis’s criticism, ambushed, some said in a house of worship, and Reverend Lewis came under fierce criticism in the national media. The governor of Virginia and the local vestry felt the need to apologize for his breech of protocol. But as far as I know, Lewis never apologized. A year later Johnson announced that he would not run for a second term. James Jones, President Johnson’s chief of staff wrote years later in the Times: “Mr. Johnson had begun to doubt our ability to prosecute the war to any clear-cut victory.” Precisely the criticism made by Reverend Lewis at Bruton Parish.

As a young teenager I considered Lewis something of a pompous ass, in love with hearing himself speak from on high, delivering well-tuned platitudes that soothed the earnest complacency of those filling the pews below. But Lewis broke from his habitual cautiousness that day, his conscience aroused, he seized what he knew was a once in a lifetime moment, and challenged the President of the United States on the prosecution of the war in Vietnam. Lewis’s church was not a safe space that day.

So, when I see the cast of Hamilton stand up and respectfully challenge Mike Pence in the sanctuary of a Broadway theater, I think back to that day in Virginia in 1967. Sometimes it is necessary to disturb the normally observed conventions, to break the fourth wall when the opportunity presents itself, and confront those whose words and actions promote intolerance and threaten our principles and our rights. May there be no safe spaces over the next four years for Mike Pence or Donald Trump.

Reverend Lewis closed his 1967 sermon to Lyndon Johnson with these words:

“The years ahead will be painful. Customs which seem an essential part of life may have to be given up. Opinions we have held tenaciously may be proven false. Physical and emotional landmarks may be swept aside. We may be compelled to think new thoughts and walk in new paths. Emerging young men and women who will gradually take over must have more understanding than we have had. Necessity will compel them to rise to greater heights than we have known. The future looks terrible; but with guidance from God (as in every strategic juncture of history) He will infuse the essential factor into the equation – something we could never suspect as a possibility – to make the future glorious.”

Chrystie and Stanton Street — © Brian Rose

Chrystie Street — © Brian Rose

Post election New York. Despite the shocking result — Trump mustered barely 10% in Manhattan where his fraudulent antics have been known for decades — beauty is still to be found in the ordinary. The morning sun glints off of aluminum studs stacked upright in a construction supply business. Hearts pop colorfully (maybe cheerfully) from the doorway of a bar as a figure darts by. Two pictures, less than 30 seconds apart.

© Brian Rose

Whither America?

Screen capture of Untapped Cities website

An article and portfolio of my photographs from WTC on Untapped Cities, a web journal about New York City.

WTC is book about the Twin Towers, their presence and absence, and the rebuilding of the city after September 11.

It is also a tribute to New Yorkers and all who carry a piece of the great city with them. It is a book that commemorates rather than exploits, a book that preserves memories, both painful and hopeful, and celebrates, however cautiously, the resilience of this city in the face of adversity.

Purchase WTC here.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Random street scene without comment.

Close up of Folk City 20th anniversary flyer (1979)
4-11-61 Robert Dylan

In many respects, Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in literature is an affirmation of what those in my songwriter circle have been doing for decades – crafting songs in which music and lyrics interlock in poetic balance. Is it literature, or something else? Certainly, Dylan’s lyrics were not meant to stand alone on the page, though many of his lines and phrases have become as familiar as Shakespeare or the Bible.

My old friend, the songwriter Jack Hardy, now deceased, would have probably sneered at Dylan’s Nobel accolade – after all, in Jack’s demimonde of folk music, Dylan was a sellout. He was/is a pop star of tremendous fame and fortune. That makes him a problematic figure to some, but I see his hyper success, to a great extent, as a product of the 60s, when songwriters and rock bands burst onto the scene promoted by an expanding record industry and the rich diversity of free form radio. He tapped into the cultural revolution of the moment – as did the Beatles – and his songs were disruptive and catalytic, both in social and aesthetic terms.

It’s harder now. There are a million more opportunities to get one’s work out there, which is a good thing, but the method of distribution is atomized, and audiences break down into smaller and smaller niches. The shared experience of a stunning new song crackling across the airwaves such as “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Tangled up in Blue” is largely a thing of the past. We now rely on youtube videos, streaming music, or other electronic forms of connective tissue.

For many songwriters that also means doing it the old fashioned way, playing to people directly, making tours of small clubs and even living rooms. And in fact, the kind of song that Bob Dylan mastered was the outgrowth of an oral tradition deeply rooted in western culture, cross-pollinated by influences from the African diaspora in North America. Jack Hardy would have called it the bardic tradition (minus the lyres and leprechauns, please), and he was right. The kind of song that Dylan cultivated and ultimately transcended was based on an ancient means of lyrical communication that pre-dates what we think of now as literature.

So, I’d like to think that the Nobel committee has recognized one of the greatest and most complex artists of our time not so much for extending the boundaries of literature, but for reconnecting us to the roots of literature itself.

Mural by Joe Lanzilotta, Hingetown, Cleveland, Ohio — © Brian Rose

Passing through Cleveland on the way to Oberlin, Ohio we stopped in an area called Hingetown west of the city’s Warehouse District. Had a great coffee at Rising Star Coffee Roasters in an old firehouse. Across the street was a mural by Cleveland artist Joe Lanzilotta.

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College — © Brian Rose

We traveled Upstate to visit colleges last weekend — my son is a high school senior — and he is looking at various options. We stopped briefly at Bard, a couple hours up the Hudson from New York City, and walked around Frank Gehry’s auditorium with its billowing metallic sheathing. The grey silvery material melded with a lowering sky as if threatening to fly off in the wind.

WTC book launch, the Great Hall, Cooper Union

The launch of WTC took place at Cooper Union in the Great Hall, the famous room where Abraham Lincoln gave his “right makes might” speech. It was an honor to present my book there as an alumnus of Cooper, and it seemed the right place for a book so interwoven with the history of New York.

Sean Corcoran of the Museum of the City of New York gave an introduction, and I then walked the audience through the book, reading excerpts from the text. Afterwards, we adjourned to the lobby for refreshments, and I signed books with my son, Brendan, helping make sales. Thanks everyone who made this possible, my Kickstarter backers, friends and family, New Yorkers.

WTC is available here.

The Great Hall, Cooper Union

Storage closet in Chelsea — © Brian Rose

This is what 2,000 books looks like when stacked nine boxes high. 169 boxes in all. Your first thought when they arrive is — what have I done?! — and then they fit exactly as determined weeks ago when they were on a container ship slowly making their way to New York. So, no surprises.

The moment of truth is here. Please join me for the book launch in Cooper Union’s Great Hall. I will be doing a slide talk, taking questions, and there will be a reception afterwards with books available for purchase and signing. See you there!

WTC Book Launch
September 8, 6:30pm

The Great Hall
Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street
New York City