Abstract: White families and African Americans started to leave Atlantic City beginning in the late 1960s. Businesses followed their customers. Local bankers and business leaders continued in the 1970s to look for ways to boost the city's struggling economy, ignoring the burgeoning gay tourist sector and the city's growing Puerto Rican and black neighborhoods. Instead, like their counterparts in other deindustrialized cities, they looked for ways to bring middle-class families back to town, not to live, but to visit.

Keywords: White families, African Americans, South Inlet, Puerto Ricans, gay tourism,