By the Boards

Miss America Has Gone Away And Atlantic City Is on the Rebound, With Some Big High Heels To Fill

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J.

Today, America should miss Miss America, but we'll hardly notice she's gone.

She'd have been crowned last night. This morning, for her photo op, she would have frolicked in the ocean surf with strained spontaneity. But there will be no more wet frolics and no more parades on the boardwalk with its rinky-dink souvenir shops and its hulking, smoke-filled casinos.

Miss America has left Atlantic City, her home of 84 years, as well as her September time slot and her greater meaning. She'll take place in January now, in some other city -- no one knows where -- and she'll be less a symbol of America's history and ideals and more like any other pageant. There are so many pageants these days.

It is hard to imagine her wholesomeness without the backdrop of Atlantic City to put her in relief. Right behind Boardwalk Hall runs Pacific Avenue, with its countless cash-for-gold shops and a club called Dancing Dolls, which may as well have been clear on the other side of Jersey for all the pageant seemed to notice. People say Miss America's undoing was her failure to realize that the world was changing, but perhaps she was just too well-mannered to mention it.

In any case, she is broke. Last year she lost $1.7 million. ABC dropped her. Worse, no one cared. She'd grown invisible, like an aged beauty. In 1989, she had nearly 30 million viewers. Fifteen years later, she had a third of that. More recently, she entered into a contract with Country Music Television, and the pageant's president, Art McMaster, hopes to know by the end of the month where the next Miss America production will be. He doubts she'll have a permanent home; more likely, he says, she'll change venues every year or so, always searching for the next best deal. A discount beauty queen.

Miss America has followed Atlantic City's rise and fall, although -- as with everything -- she tended to be a few decades behind. She was a novelty act and then she was great and now she is a novelty act once more. Just as the city is poised to rise again, she's leaving.

Sweet, strangely modest in a bathing suit, she is the righteous heart of Atlantic City, gone for good.

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Atlantic City isn't what way it used to be -- resort hotels and ladies in fur coats. Once upon a time, you could buy china and diamonds and fine perfume along the boardwalk. It was a honeymoon destination, and the early pageant had to be careful not to appear too cheesecake for fear of offending respectable middle-class vacationers.

Nowadays, Atlantic City has declared itself "Always Turned On." At a cheap hotel along Black Horse Pike, there's yelling in the hallway in the middle of the night, and the front desk woman threatens to call the cops. In the morning, you park on Atlantic Avenue and walk past a vacant lot and a boarded-up building, toward the ocean.

Atlantic City has come a long way from the wreck it was in the '60s and '70s, and there is fine shopping to be found if you search, but the boardwalk still has a rundown feel. There are T-shirt shops and funnel cake stands and arcades and seated massages. There's a long-haired man with mismatched shoes doing slow wheelies in his wheelchair. There's a man with one arm inexpertly tattooed MARCELLE. In a lot along the boardwalk, a dog barks from inside a van painted with the words GOD IS ANGRY. A man pushing a rolling boardwalk chair calls out, "Limo!"