Alcohol Treatment Center in Atlantic City, NJ.

For many years before the city’s founding, the island site of the future settlement was the summer home of the Lenape Native Americans. While the precise date of the first permanent occupation of what came to be Atlantic City by European settlers has not been precisely determined, it is commonly thought that in 1783 Jeremiah Leeds first built and occupied an all year home on the island. However, it was not until 1850 that the idea arose to develop the location into a resort town and in early 1853 the name “Atlantic City” was adopted.

Because of its location in South Jersey, which hugs the Atlantic Ocean between marshlands and islands, Atlantic City was viewed by developers as prime real estate and a potential resort town. In 1853, the first commercial hotel, the Belloe House, which was built at the intersection of Massachusetts and Atlantic Avenues.

The city was incorporated in 1854, the same year train service began on the Camden and Atlantic Railroad. Built on the edge of the bay, this served as the direct link of this remote parcel of land with Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That same year, construction of the Absecon Lighthouse, designed by George Meade of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, was approved, with work initiated the next year. By 1874, almost 500,000 passengers a year were coming to Atlantic City by rail. In Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City, “Atlantic City’s Godfather” Nelson Johnson describes the inspiration of Jonathan Pitney (the “Father of Atlantic City”) to develop Atlantic City as a health resort, his efforts to convince the municipal authorities that a railroad to the beach would be beneficial, his successful alliance with Samuel Richards (entrepreneur and member of the most influential family in southern New Jersey at the time) to achieve that goal, the actual building of the railroad, and the experience of the first 600 riders, who “were chosen carefully by Samuel Richards and Jonathan Pitney”: