Inquirer Staff Writer
ATLANTIC CITY - They took the Miss America pageant out of Atlantic City.
Now they want to take the Atlantic City out of Monopoly.
So yesterday, the Atlantic City Convention and Visitors Authority rolled out Mr. Peanut, the Borgata Babes, and an assortment of politicians to decry manufacturer Hasbro's plan to remove the city's association with an American icon that officials say it helped create.
Hasbro said it would still produce the "classic" version, which features the Queen of Resorts. But the new Here and Now edition, with landmarks from as many as 22 American cities, would become its flagship, said Matt Collins, vice president of marketing for Hasbro.
In Atlantic City, that idea will never pass Go.
"Monopoly didn't make Atlantic City; Atlantic City made Monopoly," Atlantic County Freeholder Director Dennis Levinson said, standing before about 100 people who had gathered in front of Boardwalk Hall - the former home of the Miss America pageant - to sign a billboard-size petition against the plan.
Massachusetts-based Hasbro last month launched a campaign to renew excitement about the 71-year-old game by letting players vote to include landmarks from cities such as Boston, Chicago, Denver and even Philadelphia on the redesigned board.
Nowhere on the board would there be a mention of Atlantic City, where, during the depths of the Depression, Philadelphian Charles Darrow popularized the idea of including Atlantic City's streets and Boardwalk in a game about real estate, money and power.
But this isn't the first time Atlantic City has been left off the board. Hasbro produces dozens of specialty versions of Monopoly, including SpongeBob SquarePants and Star Wars editions. And stores on nearly every campus in the United States sell editions made by Hasbro for that college or university.
"It's a dice game, isn't it?" asked lifelong Atlantic City resident Joseph Polillo, 59. "You roll dice when you play Monopoly, don't you?
"Then it's a sacrilege to not include Atlantic City, a gaming town, in the game," said Polillo, who dressed up as King Neptune in a similar effort staged by Atlantic City officials when Miss America decided to leave town late last year.
King Neptune was the guy who crowned Miss America in the early days of the bathing-beauty contest, when the pageant became a symbol of Atlantic City. Polillo didn't bother to dig out the costume yesterday.
And while Jeffrey Vasser, executive director of the Convention and Visitors Authority, said the loss of Miss America and Monopoly's change of venue were two very different situations, he knows a dissing when he sees it.
"I recognize that we don't have a monopoly on Monopoly, but when it hit me that this new edition will be become the flagship edition, I knew that we needed to make sure that Atlantic City always remains a part of Monopoly," he said. "This is the city that enabled them to do what they do today."
Well, sort of.
In The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle, published in 1998, author Ralph Anspach wrote that Monopoly's roots began in the Landlord's Game, invented and patented in 1904 by a Midwesterner named Elizabeth Magie. By 1910, it had become a "folkgame" played on homemade boards at finance and economics schools all over the country, including Princeton, Swarthmore and Wharton.
Magie's printed versions of from 1910 indicated the object was to "obtain as much wealth or money as possible" and contained many elements later found in Darrow's version, including a 40-space square board, 22 properties, four railroads, and the Go and "Go to jail" spaces.
Besides doing away with Atlantic City, Hasbro's new version will add airports instead of railroads and replace the vintage flatiron, wheelbarrow, and horse and rider with yet-to-be-named "modern-day" tokens.
Source: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/states/new_jersey/14485187.htm
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