The Shore: Beauty and the Boardwalk

“It was riveting, emotional … watching [McGreevey] go through a catharsis and an epiphany, and seeing the weight of the world get lifted off the guy’s shoulders at the same time he was about to go do probably the hardest thing anyone would have to do: resign a job that he’d worked his whole life for; talk to his family about something that he’d never had the courage to talk to them about in his 45 years.” In McGreevey’s library, the governor dictated his resignation speech, and Bashaw wrote it down.

Bashaw calls those strange days in August last year “a parenthesis” in his brief stint at public service. He survived the media firestorm and the questions, from not only the New Jersey press, but from the L.A. Times, Newsweek and People magazine, about his relationship with McGreevey. (He would ask reporters if they had friends they didn’t sleep with.) He decided to stay on at CRDA and use some of that big pile of money to implement the ideas he’d spoken about so passionately that first night he met McGreevey.

“HEY CURTIS BASHAW, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!” shouts a Boardwalk rolling-chair pusher.

It’s a hot summer day, and Bashaw is moving fast down the boards, running late, as usual, for his next appointment, and trying to give me a quick tour of how he hopes to transform Atlantic City.

Bashaw admits that when he took the CRDA job, he had little knowledge of Atlantic City. In his first weeks, introducing himself to the casino executives, he noticed that most of their offices contained old photos of the Boardwalk in its heyday, with the fine old brick hotels opening out to the ocean and a sea of well-dressed people strolling. Yet despite the nostalgia for Old Atlantic City, the big-box gambling parlors built in the past two-and-a-half decades were designed to trap players inside. A few casinos put their air-conditioning vents facing the sea.

“Oh my God,” says Bashaw, “they’re hideous.” To rectify that, he has masterminded the Boardwalk Initiative, a $100 million fund to make the historic walk appealing to walkers again. Bashaw brought in an architect with an historic preservation background and drew up a set of architectural guidelines for Boardwalk businesses — from mom-and-pop t-shirt shops to casinos — to follow if they want some of the money. The Showboat’s House of Blues, which opened last month, is the first new casino property to comply with the guidelines, and Bashaw foresees the unveiling of several new properties over the next two summers.