Downtown – Atlantic City, New Jersey
The entrance into Atlantic City gives a nice sense of arrival with these vertical pylons with stylized letters. A cluster of national chain stores makes it clear this is a shopping destination.
The Nike store has pride of place while turning the corner towards the major resorts on the shore.
Coach is located in the Tanger Outlets development, basically turning a shopping mall inside out bringing the store entrance outdoors, and superimposing it on the existing urban street grid.
Tanger gives way to a less well defined space with multiple breaks in the building wall, discouraging pedestrians.
The shopping center gives way to a more traditional downtown with businesses more oriented towards residents.
Lower height buildings maintain a pedestrian scale and a continuous building wall along the sidewalk. The Public Library is tastefully integrated into the downtown up to the sidewalk edge.
A block down is a large public open space with a much taller multi story building on its edge. This juxtaposition of void and height work, though the open space could use some upgrades like major cities have done to their urban parks.
Closer to the resorts buildings are a patchwork, interspersed with vacant lots. The public art on this building caught my eye. Unfortunately many storefronts were boarded over – a likely signal of their subsequent erasure and replacement with something new and modern.
This view captures nature reclaiming open spaces with the resort towers in the background.
Multifamily housing developments utilize the scraped lots with varying degrees of efficiency and elegance.
Another strip of buildings, mostly boarded up on the ground floor, provides a memory of the pedestrian scale built form once prevalent here.
The gray building near the center has been reclad to provide a more attractive turn when heading towards the casino.
Newer multi-story buildings make better use of their entire lot, achieving greater density and reinforcing the urban form.
New schools, similar to the library, show public investment as an incentive for equal or greater private investment to make Atlantic City more livable.
Historic buildings like this one hold pride of place, especially on corners of major streets.
The DO AC logo has prominence on the water tower and on bumper stickers throughout town.
Pennsylvania Avenue School is another example of a modern public building.
This much taller building while allowing more housing, competes with the smaller scale buildings around it.
Another vacant storefront here is activated with public art.