A Short History of Stockton in Atlantic City

The Layers of Local History

A Short History of Stockton in Atlantic City

By Levi Fox

Mayflower hotel at Tennessee Avenue where Stockton State College’s first 1,000 students attended upon opening in

    The imminent opening of Stockton University’s new Gateway Campus offers an opportunity to look back at the long history of the college’s connections to Atlantic City, as well as the histories of those spaces that Stockton has occupied over the years. Indeed, when what was then known as Stockton State College initially opened its doors in the fall of 1971, the main campus in the Pine Barrens was still under construction, so courses were taught at, and students lived in the recently closed Mayflower Hotel at Tennessee Avenue and the Boardwalk. Those 1,000 students who enrolled in that charter class found faculty offices on the second Floor, student affairs on the third, and the bookstore on the mezzanine. Though it would only last a few years as a retirement home after Stockton moved out the following year, the Mayflower had a long history. Having been built by Captain John Young of pier fame in 1901 as the Boardwalk’s first brick apartment building, it had many names over the years, one being the Knickerbocker.

Carnegie Center

    Atlantic City also impacted Stockton in other ways besides offering a place for students to live and learn. For two decades starting in 1983, zoologist and graduate of Atlantic City High School’s class of 1954, Vera King Farris, served as the third President of the college. In 2004, not long after Dr. Farris retired, Stockton opened the Carnegie Center on the corner of Pacific Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard. The Carnegie Library was the first integrated building in the city when it was initially completed in 1904, on what was then called Illinois Avenue, at a cost of $50,000 dollars. After the Atlantic City Free Public Library relocated in 1985, the Carnegie building was restored with over $5 million dollars in funding from the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, which had also funded the creation of a Civil Rights Garden–the first such memorial in the North–right next door in 2001, at a cost of $2 million. The Carnegie Center itself is home to historic displays on the structure, and the Post Office that was once located across the street, as well as a bust of local African American business pioneer Horace J. Bryant.

Dante Hall

    During the last decade, as the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey transitioned to university status, the institution has further expanded its footprint in Atlantic City. In 2011 Stockton started to run Dante Hall Theatre in the historically Italian American Ducktown neighborhood that had been restored in 2003 by the CRDA for $3.5 million dollars. It was first constructed in 1926 by St. Michael’s Catholic Church to serve as a gymnasium and hall for performances by their Opera Company, as well as students in the attached school that operated until the 1980s. A few years later, Stockton took over operations of the Noyes Museum, which had been created by Fred and Ethel Noyes in 1983 in Oceanville. Stockton then opened the Noyes Arts Garage down the street from Dante Hall, to serve as the cornerstone of the Atlantic City Arts District, as well as a second home for the African-American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey. Established in 2002 by local businessman and scholar Ralph Hunter, in the historically black community of Newtonville in Buena Vista Township, the AAHMSNJ is home to an extensive artifact collection as well as professionally designed temporary displays.

Old Atlantic City High School

 

    While completing the construction of the Gateway Campus, Stockton purchased two nearby buildings to oversee everyday tasks and plans for expansion. Since 2016, the university has managed the Stockton-Rothenberg Building, housed in the former offices of the Rothenberg, Hyatt, Eisen, and Lang law firm, across the street from a Soldier’s and Sailors Civil War Memorial.  Just a few weeks ago the Board of Trustees voted to purchase the shuttered Atlantic Club Casino that opened in 1980 as Atlantic City’s first Golden Nugget, before becoming Bally’s Grand, and finally a Hilton property. The location of the Gateway Campus itself is historic, on the site of the High School Vera King Farris once attended, and across from the Knife and Fork Inn.  O’Donnell Park, home to a WWI Monument, is across the street and could become a ‘Green Space’ at the center of Stockton’s Atlantic City operations. Stockton’s embrace of local history extends to its new buildings as well, with an area to be named for Civil Rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer who famously spoke in AC in 1964.

 

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