Eva Le Gallienne
Eva Le Gallienne was a British-born American stage actress, director and author. A Broadway star by age 21, Le Gallienne consciously ended her work on Broadway to devote herself to founding the Civic Repertory Theatre, in which she was both director and lead actress. Noted for her boldness and idealism, she became a pioneering figure in the American Repertory Movement, which enabled today's Off-Broadway. A versatile and eloquent actress herself, Le Gallienne became a respected stage coach, director and manager. Ms. Le Gallienne consciously devoted herself to the Art of the Theatre as opposed to the Show Business of Broadway and dedicated herself to upgrading the quality of the stage, she ran the Civic Repertory Theatre Company for 10 years. She managed Broadway's 1100-seat Civic Repertory Theatre at 107 West 14th Street from 1926–32, home to her company whose actors included herself, Burgess Meredith, John Garfield, J. Edward Bromberg, Paul Leyssac, Florida Friebus, David Manners, Leona Roberts.
Le Gallienne was born in London to Richard Le Gallienne, an English poet of French descent, Julie Nørregaard, a Danish journalist. They married in 1897 and separated in 1903 divorcing. After Eva's parents separated when she was four years old and her mother moved to Paris, where she spent her childhood shuttling back and forth between there and Britain. While in Paris, she was taken backstage to meet Sarah Bernhardt, she said "made an enormous impression on me", she made her stage debut at the age of 15 with a walk-on role in a 1914 production of Maurice Maeterlinck's Monna Vanna spent several months in a drama school. She left to perform in a minor comedy as a cockney servant, "brought down the house", receiving excellent reviews; the next year, at the age of 16, Le Gallienne and her mother sailed for New York City, where her first few productions were not successful, she was released from another while it was performing in out of town tryouts. She spent a season performing on the road and in summer stock.
After travelling in Europe for a period of time, she returned to New York and became a Broadway star in several plays including Arthur Richman's Not So Long Ago and Ferenc Molnár's Liliom for the Theatre Guild. Le Gallienne consciously devoted herself to the "art of the theatre" as opposed to the "show business of Broadway", was a pioneer in the emerging American Repertory Theater, she ran the Civic Repertory Theatre Company for 10 years, backed by the financial support of one of her lovers, Alice DeLamar, a wealthy Colorado gold mine heiress, producing 37 plays during that time. She managed Broadway's 1100-seat Civic Repertory Theatre at 107 West 14th Street from 1926–32, home to her company whose actors included herself, J. Edward Bromberg, Paul Leyssac, Florida Friebus, Leona Roberts; as head of the Civic Repertory Theatre, she rejected the admission of Bette Davis, whose attitude she described as "insincere" and "frivolous". The Civic Rep disbanded at the height of the Depression in 1934.
Le Gallienne was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1986. Le Gallienne never hid her lesbianism inside the acting community, but was never comfortable with her sexuality, struggling with it, she briefly considered arranging for a "front" marriage with actor Basil Rathbone. During the early days of her career she was in the company of witty, libertine actresses Tallulah Bankhead, Estelle Winwood and Blyth Daly, with the four being dubbed "The Four Horsemen of the Algonquin", referring to the Algonquin Round Table. In 1918, while in Hollywood, she began an affair with the actress Alla Nazimova, at her height of fame, who at that time wielded much power in the acting community; the affair ended due to Nazimova's jealousy. Nonetheless, Nazimova liked Le Gallienne much, assisted in her being introduced to many influential people of the day, it was Nazimova who coined the phrase "sewing circles", to describe the intricate and secret lesbian relationships lived by many actresses of the day. Le Gallienne was involved for some time with actresses Tallulah Bankhead, Beatrice Lillie and Laurette Taylor during that time.
In 1920, she became involved with poet and playwright Mercedes de Acosta about whom she was passionate for several years. She and de Acosta began their romance shortly after de Acosta's marriage to Abram Poole which strained their relationship. Still, they vacationed and travelled together at times visiting the salon of famed writer and socialite Natalie Barney. De Acosta wrote two plays for Le Gallienne during Sandro Botticelli and Jehanne de Arc. Neither was successful, they ended their relationship after five years. In 1960, when de Acosta was ill with a brain tumour and in need of money, she published her memoir Here Lies the Heart; the reviews were positive and many close friends praised the book. Le Gallienne was furious, denouncing de Acosta as a liar and claiming she invented the stories for fame, but many of de Acosta's affairs, including that with Le Gallienne, are confirmed in personal correspondence. By early 1927, Le Gallienne was involved with married actress Josephine Hutchinson. Hutchinson's husband started divorce proceedings and named Le Gallienne in the divorce proceedings as "co-respondent".
The press began accusations that named Josephine Hutchinson as a "shadow actress", which at the time meant lesbian. Five months Le Gallienne performed in a play about Emily Dickinson, titled Alison's House; the play won a Pul
Autobiography
An autobiography is a self-written account of the life of oneself. The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English periodical The Monthly Review, when he suggested the word as a hybrid, but condemned it as "pedantic". However, its next recorded use was in its present sense, by Robert Southey in 1809. Despite only being named early in the nineteenth century, first-person autobiographical writing originates in antiquity. Roy Pascal differentiates autobiography from the periodic self-reflective mode of journal or diary writing by noting that " is a review of a life from a particular moment in time, while the diary, however reflective it may be, moves through a series of moments in time". Autobiography thus takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment of composition. While biographers rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints, autobiography may be based on the writer's memory; the memoir form is associated with autobiography but it tends, as Pascal claims, to focus less on the self and more on others during the autobiographer's review of his or her life.
See also: List of autobiographies and Category:Autobiographies for examples. Autobiographical works are by nature subjective; the inability—or unwillingness—of the author to recall memories has in certain cases resulted in misleading or incorrect information. Some sociologists and psychologists have noted that autobiography offers the author the ability to recreate history. Spiritual autobiography is an account of an author's struggle or journey towards God, followed by conversion a religious conversion interrupted by moments of regression; the author re-frames his or her life as a demonstration of divine intention through encounters with the Divine. The earliest example of a spiritual autobiography is Augustine's Confessions though the tradition has expanded to include other religious traditions in works such as Zahid Rohari's An Autobiography and Black Elk Speaks; the spiritual autobiography works as an endorsement of her religion. A memoir is different in character from an autobiography. While an autobiography focuses on the "life and times" of the writer, a memoir has a narrower, more intimate focus on his or her own memories and emotions.
Memoirs have been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits. One early example is that of Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico known as Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. In the work, Caesar describes the battles that took place during the nine years that he spent fighting local armies in the Gallic Wars, his second memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili is an account of the events that took place between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war against Gnaeus Pompeius and the Senate. Leonor López de Córdoba wrote; the English Civil War provoked a number of examples of this genre, including works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. French examples from the same period include the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz and the Duc de Saint-Simon; the term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character written as though the character were writing their own autobiography, meaning that the character is the first-person narrator and that the novel addresses both internal and external experiences of the character.
Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders is an early example. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is another such classic, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is a well-known modern example of fictional autobiography. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is yet another example of fictional autobiography, as noted on the front page of the original version; the term may apply to works of fiction purporting to be autobiographies of real characters, e.g. Robert Nye's Memoirs of Lord Byron. In antiquity such works were entitled apologia, purporting to be self-justification rather than self-documentation. John Henry Newman's Christian confessional work is entitled Apologia Pro Vita Sua in reference to this tradition; the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus introduces his autobiography with self-praise, followed by a justification of his actions as a Jewish rebel commander of Galilee. The pagan rhetor Libanius framed his life memoir as one of his orations, not of a public kind, but of a literary kind that could not be aloud in privacy.
Augustine applied the title Confessions to his autobiographical work, Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same title in the 18th century, initiating the chain of confessional and sometimes racy and self-critical, autobiographies of the Romantic era and beyond. Augustine's was arguably the first Western autobiography written, became an influential model for Christian writers throughout the Middle Ages, it tells of the hedonistic lifestyle Augustine lived for a time within his youth, associating with young men who boasted of their sexual exploits. Confessions will always rank among the great masterpieces of western literature. In the spirit of Augustine's Confessions is the 12th-century Historia Cal
Fredric March
Fredric March was an American actor, regarded as "one of Hollywood's most celebrated, versatile stars of the 1930s and'40s." He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Best Years of Our Lives, as well as the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for Years Ago and Long Day's Journey into Night. March is one of only two actors, the other being Helen Hayes, to have won both the Academy Award and the Tony Award twice. March was born in Racine, the son of Cora Brown Marcher, a schoolteacher from England, John F. Bickel, a devout Presbyterian Church elder who worked in the wholesale hardware business. March attended the Winslow Elementary School, Racine High School, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi, he was a member of an "interfraternity society composed of leading students" formed at the college in 1919 named Ku Klux Klan that "appears to have had no connection with the national Klan organization" but whose "choice of a name signals an identification—or at the least, no meaningful discomfort—with the known violent actions of the Reconstruction-era Klan..."
He began a career as a banker, but an emergency appendectomy caused him to re-evaluate his life, in 1920 he began working as an extra in movies made in New York City, using a shortened form of his mother's maiden name. He appeared on Broadway in 1926, by the end of the decade, signed a film contract with Paramount Pictures. March served in the United States Army during World War I as an artillery lieutenant. March received an Oscar nomination for the 4th Academy Awards in 1930 for The Royal Family of Broadway, in which he played a role modeled on John Barrymore, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the 5th Academy Awards in 1932 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; this led to roles in a series of classic films based on stage hits and classic novels like Design for Living with Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins. March resisted signing long-term contracts with the studios, enabling him to play roles in films from a variety of studios, he returned to Broadway after a ten-year absence in 1937 with Yr.
Obedient Husband, but after the success of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth he focused as much on Broadway as on Hollywood. He won two Best Actor Tony Awards: in 1947 for the play Years Ago, written by Ruth Gordon, he had major successes in A Bell for Adano in 1944 and Gideon in 1961, played Ibsen's An Enemy of the People on Broadway in 1951. During this period he starred in films, including I Married a Witch and Another Part of the Forest, won his second Oscar in 1946 for The Best Years of Our Lives. March branched out into television, winning Emmy nominations for his third attempt at The Royal Family for the series The Best of Broadway as well as for television performances as Samuel Dodsworth and Ebenezer Scrooge. On March 25, 1954, March co-hosted the 26th Annual Academy Awards ceremony from New York City, with co-host Donald O'Connor in Los Angeles. March's neighbor in Connecticut, playwright Arthur Miller, was thought to favor March to inaugurate the part of Willy Loman in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman.
However, March read the play and turned down the role, whereupon director Elia Kazan cast Lee J. Cobb as Willy, Arthur Kennedy as one of Willy's sons, Biff Loman, two men that the director had worked with in the film Boomerang. March regretted turning down the role and played Willy Loman in Columbia Pictures's 1951 film version of the play, directed by Laslo Benedek, receiving his fifth and final Oscar nomination as well as a Golden Globe Award. March played one of two leads in The Desperate Hours with Humphrey Bogart. Bogart and Spencer Tracy had both insisted upon top billing and Tracy withdrew, leaving the part available for March. In 1957, March was awarded the George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for "distinguished contribution to the art of film."On February 12, 1959, March appeared before a joint session of the 86th United States Congress, reading the Gettysburg Address as part of a commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. March co-starred with Spencer Tracy in the 1960 Stanley Kramer film Inherit the Wind, in which he played a dramatized version of famous orator and political figure William Jennings Bryan.
March's Bible-thumping character provided a rival for Tracy's Clarence Darrow-inspired character. In the 1960s, March's film career continued with a performance as President Jordan Lyman in the political thriller Seven Days in May in which he co-starred with Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Edmond O'Brien. March made several spoken word recordings, including a version of Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant issued in 1945, in which he narrated and played the title role, The Sounds of History, a twelve volume LP set accompanying the twelve volume set of books The Life History of the United States, published by Time-Life; the recordings were narrated by Charles Collingwood, with March and his wife Florence Eldridge performing dramatic
Fox Film
The Fox Film Corporation was an American company that produced motion pictures, formed by William Fox on 1 February 1915. It was the corporate successor to his earlier Greater New York Film Rental Company and Box Office Attractions Film Company; the company's first film studios were set up in Fort Lee, New Jersey but in 1917, William Fox sent Sol M. Wurtzel to Hollywood, California to oversee the studio's new West Coast production facilities where a more hospitable and cost effective climate existed for filmmaking. On July 23, 1926, the company bought the patents of the Movietone sound system for recording sound on to film. After the Crash of 1929, William Fox lost control of the company during a hostile takeover. Under new president Sidney Kent, the new owners merged the company with Twentieth Century Pictures to form 20th Century Fox in 1935. William Fox entered the film industry in 1904 when he purchased a one-third share of a Brooklyn nickelodeon for $1,667, he reinvested his profits from that initial location, expanding to fifteen similar venues in the city, purchasing prints from the major studios of the time: Biograph, Kalem, Pathé, Vitagraph.
After experiencing further success presenting live vaudeville routines along with motion pictures, he expanded into larger venues beginning with his purchase of the disused Gaiety theater, continuing with acquisitions throughout New York City and New Jersey, including the Academy of Music. Fox invested further in the film industry by founding the Greater New York Film Rental Company as a film distributor. However, the major film studios formed the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 and the General Film Company in 1910, in an effort to create a monopoly on the creation and distribution of motion pictures. Fox refused to sell out to the monopoly, sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act receiving a $370,000 settlement, ending restrictions on the length of films and the prices that could be paid for screenplays. In 1914, reflecting the broader scope of his business, he renamed it the Box Office Attraction Film Rental Company, he entered into a contract with the Balboa Amusement Producing Company film studio, purchasing all of their films for showing in his New York area theaters and renting the prints to other exhibitors nationwide.
He continued to distribute material from other sources, such as Winsor McCay's early animated film Gertie the Dinosaur. That year, Fox concluded that depending on other companies for the products he depended on was insufficient, he purchased the Éclair studio facilities in Fort Lee, New Jersey, along with property in Staten Island, arranged for actors and crew. The company became a film studio, with its name shortened to the Box Office Attractions Company. Always more of an entrepreneur than a showman, Fox concentrated on building theaters; the company's first film studios were set up in Fort Lee, New Jersey where it and many other early film studios in America's first motion picture industry were based at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1914, Fox Film began making motion pictures in California, in 1915 decided to build its own permanent studio; the company leased the Edendale studio of the Selig Polyscope Company until its own studio, located at Western Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, was completed in 1916.
In 1917, William Fox sent Sol M. Wurtzel to Hollywood to oversee the studio's West Coast production facilities where a more hospitable and cost-effective climate existed for filmmaking. With the introduction of sound technology, Fox moved to acquire the rights to a sound-on-film process. In the years 1925–26, Fox purchased the rights to the work of Freeman Harrison Owens, the U. S. rights to the Tri-Ergon system invented by three German inventors, the work of Theodore Case. This resulted in the Movietone sound system known as "Fox Movietone" developed at the Movietone Studio; that year, the company began offering films with a music-and-effects track, the following year Fox began the weekly Fox Movietone News feature, that ran until 1963. The growing company needed space, in 1926 Fox acquired 300 acres in the open country west of Beverly Hills and built "Movietone City", the best-equipped studio of its time; when rival Marcus Loew died in 1927, Fox offered to buy the Loew family's holdings. Loew's Inc. controlled more than 200 theaters, as well as the MGM studio.
When the family agreed to the sale, the merger of Fox and Loew's Inc. was announced in 1929. But MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer was not fought back. Using political connections, Mayer called on the Justice Department's antitrust unit to delay giving final approval to the merger. Fox was badly injured in a car crash in the summer of 1929, by the time he recovered he had lost most of his fortune in the fall 1929 stock market crash, ending any chance of the merger going through without the Justice Department's objections. Overextended and close to bankruptcy, Fox was stripped of his empire in 1930 and ended up in jail for bribery charges. Fox Film, with more than 500 theatres, was placed in receivership. A bank-mandated reorganization propped the company up for a time, but it soon became apparent that despite its size, Fox could not stand on its own. William Fox resented the way he was forced out of the company and portrayed it as an active conspiracy against him in the 1933 book Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox.
Under new president Sidney Kent, the new owners began negotiating with the upstart, but powerful independent Twentieth Century Pictures in the early spring of 1935. The two companies merged that spring as 20th Century-Fox. For many years, 20th Century Fox claimed to hav
Compromised (1931 film)
Compromised is an all-talking pre-code drama film produced and released by First National Pictures, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. and directed by John G. Adolfi; the movie stars Ben Lyon, Claude Gillingwater and Florence Britton. It was based on a play by Edith Fitzgerald. No film elements are known to survive; the soundtrack, recorded on Vitaphone disks, may survive in private hands. Rose Hobart as Ann Brock Ben Lyon as Sidney Brock Claude Gillingwater as John Brock Florence Britton as Louise Brock Emma Dunn as Mrs. Squires Bert Roach as Tony Delmar Watson as Sandy Louise Mackintosh as Mrs. Munsey Juliette Compton as Connie Holt Edgar Norton as Tipton Adele Watson as Mrs. Bird Virginia Sale as Maggie Compromised on IMDb synopsis at AllMovie
House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Un-American Activities Committee was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. The HUAC was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, those organizations suspected of having Fascist or Communist ties. In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security"; when the House abolished the committee in 1975, its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee. The committee's anti-communist investigations are compared with those of Joseph McCarthy who, as a U. S. Senator, had no direct involvement with this House committee. McCarthy was the chairman of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U. S. Senate, not the House; the Overman Committee was a subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary chaired by North Carolina Democratic Senator Lee Slater Overman that operated from September 1918 to June 1919.
The subcommittee investigated German as well as Bolshevik elements in the United States. This committee was concerned with investigating pro-German sentiments in the American liquor industry. After World War I ended in November 1918, the German threat lessened, the committee began investigating Bolshevism, which had appeared as a threat during the First Red Scare after the Russian Revolution in 1917; the committee's hearing into Bolshevik propaganda, conducted February 11 to March 10, 1919, had a decisive role in constructing an image of a radical threat to the United States during the first Red Scare. Congressman Hamilton Fish III, a fervent anti-communist, introduced, on May 5, 1930, House Resolution 180, which proposed to establish a committee to investigate communist activities in the United States; the resulting committee known as the Fish Committee, undertook extensive investigations of people and organizations suspected of being involved with or supporting communist activities in the United States.
Among the committee's targets were the American Civil Liberties Union and communist presidential candidate William Z. Foster; the committee recommended granting the United States Department of Justice more authority to investigate communists, strengthening of immigration and deportation laws to keep communists out of the United States. From 1934 to 1937, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities, chaired by John William McCormack and Samuel Dickstein, held public and private hearings and collected testimony filling 4,300 pages; the committee was known as the McCormack–Dickstein committee. Its mandate was to get "information on how foreign subversive propaganda entered the U. S. and the organizations that were spreading it", it was replaced with a similar committee that focused on pursuing communists. Its records are held by the National Archives and Records Administration as records related to HUAC; the committee investigated allegations of a fascist plot to seize the White House, known as the "business plot".
Although the plot was reported as a hoax, the committee confirmed some details of the accusations. It has been reported that while Dickstein served on this committee and the subsequent Special investigation Committee, he was paid $1,250 a month by the Soviet NKVD, which hoped to get secret congressional information on anti-communists and pro-fascists, it is unclear whether he passed on any information. On May 26, 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established as a special investigating committee, reorganized from its previous incarnations as the Fish Committee and the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, those organizations suspected of having communist or fascist ties, it was therefore known as the Dies Committee. Its records are held by the National Archives and Records Administration as records related to HUAC. In 1938, Hallie Flanagan, the head of the Federal Theatre Project, was subpoenaed to appear before the committee to answer the charge the project was overrun with communists.
Flanagan was called to testify for only a part of one day, while a clerk from the project was called in for two entire days. It was during this investigation that one of the committee members, Joe Starnes, famously asked Flanagan whether the Elizabethan era playwright Christopher Marlowe was a member of the Communist Party, mused "Mr. Euripides" preached class warfare. In 1939, the committee investigated leaders of the American Youth Congress, a Communist International affiliate organization; the committee put together an argument for the internment of Japanese Americans known as the "Yellow Report". Organized in response to rumors of Japanese Americans being coddled by the War Relocation Authority and news that some former inmates would be allowed to leave camp and Nisei soldiers to return to the West Coast, the committee investigated charges of fifth column activity in the camps. A number of anti-WRA arguments were presented in subsequent hearings, but Director Dillon Myer debunked the more inflammatory claims.
The investigation was presented to the 77th Congress, alleged that certain cultural traits – Japanese loyalty to the Emperor, the number of Japanese fishermen in the US, the Buddhist faith – were evidence for Japanese espionage. With the exception of Rep. Herman Eberharter, the members of the committee seemed to support internment, its recommendations to expedite the impending se
Atlantic City, New Jersey
Atlantic City is a resort city in Atlantic County, New Jersey, United States, known for its casinos and beaches. In 2010, the city had a population of 39,558, it was incorporated on May 1854, from portions of Egg Harbor Township and Galloway Township. It borders Absecon, Pleasantville, Ventnor City, Egg Harbor Township, the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantic City inspired the U. S. version of the board game Monopoly the street names. Since 1921, Atlantic City has been the home of the Miss America pageant. In 1976, New Jersey voters legalized casino gambling in Atlantic City; the first casino opened two years later. Because of its location in South Jersey, hugging 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, was built at the intersection of Massachusetts and Atlantic Avenues; the city was incorporated in 1854, the same year in which the Camden and Atlantic Railroad train service began.
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 500,000 passengers a year were coming to Atlantic City by rail. In Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, Corruption of Atlantic City, "Atlantic City's Godfather" Nelson Johnson describes the inspiration of Dr. Jonathan Pitney 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 to achieve that goal, the actual building of the railroad, the experience of the first 600 riders, who "were chosen by Samuel Richards and Jonathan Pitney": After arriving in Atlantic City, a second train brought the visitors to the door of the resort's first public lodging, the United States Hotel.
The hotel was owned by the railroad. It was a sprawling, four-story structure built to house 2,000 guests, it opened while it was still under construction, with only one wing standing, that wasn't completed. By year's end, when it was constructed, the United States Hotel was not only the first hotel in Atlantic City but the largest in the nation, its rooms totaled more than 600, its grounds covered some 14 acres. The first boardwalk was built in 1870 along a portion of the beach in an effort to help hotel owners keep sand out of their lobbies. Businesses were restricted and the boardwalk was removed each year at the end of the peak season; because of its effectiveness and popularity, the boardwalk was expanded in length and width, modified several times in subsequent years. The historic length of the boardwalk, before the destructive 1944 Great Atlantic Hurricane, was about 7 miles and it extended from Atlantic City to Longport, through Ventnor and Margate; the first road connecting the city to the mainland at Pleasantville was completed in 1870 and charged a 30-cent toll.
Albany Avenue was the first road to the mainland available without a toll. By 1878, because of the growing popularity of the city, one railroad line could no longer keep up with demand. Soon, the Philadelphia and Atlantic City Railway was constructed to transport tourists to Atlantic City. At this point massive hotels like The United States and Surf House, as well as smaller rooming houses, had sprung up all over town; the United States Hotel took up a full city block between Atlantic, Pacific and Maryland Avenues. These hotels were not only impressive in size, but featured the most updated amenities, were considered quite luxurious for their time. In the early part of the 20th century, Atlantic City went through a radical building boom. Many of the modest boarding houses that dotted the boardwalk were replaced with large hotels. Two of the city's most distinctive hotels were the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel and the Traymore Hotel. In 1903, Josiah White III bought a parcel of land near Ohio Avenue and the boardwalk and built the Queen Anne style Marlborough House.
The hotel was a success and, in 1905–06, he chose to expand the hotel and bought another parcel of land adjacent to his Marlborough House. In an effort to make his new hotel a source of conversation, White hired the architectural firm of Price and McLanahan; the firm made use of reinforced concrete, a new building material invented by Jean-Louis Lambot in 1848. The hotel's Spanish and Moorish themes, capped off with its signature dome and chimneys, represented a step forward from other hotels that had a classically designed influence. White merged the two hotels into the Marlborough-Blenheim. Bally's Atlantic City was constructed at this location; the Traymore Hotel was located at the corner of the boardwalk. Begun in 1879 as a small boarding house, the hotel grew through a series of uncoordinated expansions. By 1914, the hotel's owner, Daniel White, taking a hint from the Marlborough-Blenheim, commissioned the firm of Price and McLanahan to build an bigger hotel. Rising 16 stories, the tan brick and gold-capped hotel would become one of the city's best-known landmarks.
The hotel made use of ocean-facing hotel rooms by jutting its wings farther from the main portion of the hotel along Pacific Avenue. One by one, additional large hotels were constructed along the boardwalk, including the Brighton, Shelburne, Ritz Carlton, Madison House, the Breakers. The
