The casinos came to town in May 1978 after state residents passed a referendum allowing them into Atlantic City in 1976. They arrived into a landscape of decay and depression. Atlantic City was a very bleak place to live in the 1970s, having never broken away from its summer resort economy. There was little economic hope or opportunity outside the three summer months and the city never recovered its status as a premiere ocean resort in the early twentieth century. The situation in Atlantic City was such that the city's primary hospital barely covered expenses and a new medical centre it opened on the ‘mainland’ barely survived its first year of operation in 1976. Atlantic City was also in the midst of a steep population decline that would lower its population by almost 50 per cent in twenty years, to about 41,000 in 1980 from over 60,000 in 1960.

By 1976, the famous Boardwalk had become a platform for observing the city's decay. Garbage and debris littered the city and the once glorious hotels were barely surviving. Boarding houses and blocks bereft of human activity greeted visitors, including the early casino visionaries. Amidst the crumbling city of the era, the nation's racial and class tensions played out as urban blacks from around the mid-Atlantic flowed into the city on summer weekend bus trips. This alarmed city leaders who were trying hard to make the city once again attractive to middle-class white visitors. Steel Pier owner George Hamid Sr, for example, sought to discourage black day-tripping ‘shoobies’ (they packed their necessaries in shoeboxes), by re-creating his uptown Steel Pier as a quasi-Disneyland with an aquarium, petting zoo, even an ice skating rink operable in the summer. After all, how many ‘shoobies’ were ice skaters?

Long-time resident Barbara Devlin recalled the slow-paced, summer-resort atmosphere of the pre-casino years after the resort's glory era in the early twentieth century: