The next time you're passing through the Lexington Market on the way to Faidley's Seafood, look up at the neon American flag. It's one of two known extant items from Atlantic City's Steel Pier, the once-fabled venue that was the center of East Coast entertainment for 75 years.
"Bob Graziosi from Reisterstown was in the basement of the Steel Pier sometime in the 1960s and saw it," said Steve Liebowitz, whose book, "Steel Pier, Atlantic City: Showplace of the Nation," was published last month.
"He asked the Hamids, who owned the pier, if he could have it, and they said he could. It had hung above the proscenium arch of the Marine Ballroom for years until it was taken down in 1962," Liebowitz said.
Graziosi had it shipped to Baltimore and, after having it restored, realized he couldn't have it displayed in his home, so he loaned it to the old Civic Center, where it greeted visitors for a few years before being moved to its present home.
The Diving Bell, a popular attraction that took thousands of Steel Pier visitors to the bottom of the Atlantic for decades, was restored in 1988 and is now on display at Gardner's Basin in Atlantic City.
Outside of vintage postcards and other Atlantic City-related paper ephemera, they are the "only two tangible Steel Pier artifacts left that I know of," Liebowitz said.
Liebowitz, 53, a longtime Owings Mills resident who graduated from Milford Mill High School and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, spent summers with his family during the 1960s and 1970s in Wildwood, N.J., about 40 miles south of Atlantic City.
"Once during those vacations, my mother would suggest a trip to Atlantic City to see what was going on," he said. "I've always been fascinated by old theaters and especially those that were in ruins. I remember being fascinated by the craziness of the Steel Pier."
The first visitors began arriving in Atlantic City by rail in the mid-1850s, and a mere 30 years later, it had emerged as a fashionable summer destination for the bon ton.
"By the 1880s, Atlantic City evolved into a popular vacation destination, gracing the cover of Harper's Weekly magazine numerous times," Liebowitz wrote.
"A staple of traveling acrobats and performers entertained on the beach for curious onlookers, while dignified men and women arriving from Philadelphia strolled along the surf, breathing in the invigorating salt air," he wrote.
When an oceanfront hotel owner became annoyed at guests for tracking sand into his hostelry, he had a temporary boardwalk built across the sand, and in doing so, gave birth to what became one of the city's most enduring and distinguishing features.
It wasn't long before enterprising vendors saw the intrinsic value of the wooden walkway for peddling their services, and they began installing booths that offered games of chance, food and other amusement attractions to passers-by.
While the Steel Pier, which was constructed in 1898, wasn't the first pier to be built in the ocean resort that became known as the "World's Playground," it did become its most famous entertainment venue.
The pier, which eventually stretched a half-mile out into rolling Atlantic waters, took its name from the iron pilings and steel girders upon which rested an eclectic confection of structures that were dedicated to entertainment, and which billed itself as the "World's Greatest Amusement Value. A Vacation In Itself."
Liebowitz credits Frank P. Gravatt, who took over ownership of the pier in 1925, with being a marketing genius and master promoter. Gravatt signed march king John Philip Sousa to a lifetime contract. Silent screen star Rudolph Valentino made an appearance there only weeks before his death.
Good taste reigned, and no shows were held on Sundays - only concerts, writes Liebowitz. "Only those men wearing jackets were allowed on Steel Pier, as it was considered the most conservative of all the piers.
Gravatt kept customers coming with a promotion that offered "Low admission, Lots of Attractions," underscored by the motto "a five dollar show for fifty cents."
Liebowitz said that each year, 2 million patrons paid the 50 cents for the variety of entertainment that Gravatt made available.
He sought national advertisers such as Texaco, which erected a large neon sign on the pier. He enlarged the ballroom in 1929 and renamed it the Marine Ballroom.
In 1927, Gravatt hired George A. Hamid to create a circus on the pier and book other acts.
After the two men had a falling out in 1938, Hamid leased the rival Million Dollar Pier, which he operated until purchasing Steel Pier in 1945.
Joined by his son, George A. Hamid Jr., the family continued to own and operate the pier until selling it in 1973.
During the glory years of the 1920s through the 1960s, when the paralysis that eventually destroyed Atlantic City began to make itself known, there wasn't a major big band, singer, comedy act, Hollywood movie star, or radio and TV personality of the era who didn't perform in the Marine Ballroom or make a Steel Pier appearance.
Such bands from the Paul Whiteman Orchestra to Chubby Checker and the Rolling Stones had the old pier rocking. Audiences jammed the pier to see the famed Diving Horse. And for years, Miss America pageants were held on Steel Pier, accompanied by standing-room-only crowds in the Marine Ballroom.
In the early 1970s, the old Atlantic City began giving way to the present one, and once-glamorous hotels, such as the Traymore, Marlborough-Blenheim, the Ambassador, the Senator and the Chelsea, fell to make way for today's casinos.
The pier closed in 1978 and a 1982 fire destroyed what remained.
A reporter for The Atlantic City Press observed that the Steel Pier "didn't die all at once. It went dark slowly throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as a marquee can die slowly, bulb by bulb."
Liebowitz said the pier died because people stopped caring about it; in the casino era, they came to Atlantic City to gamble, not to visit an amusement pier.
"In its time, Steel Pier was the greatest entertainment complex to ever exist in the world," he writes. "There was nothing else like it ... it was taken for granted, as if it would always be there every summer, offering a different show, lasting an eternity."