Off-Topic: "Boardwalk Empire"

Not that it's relevant to my work here, but if I don't blog this piece, I'll be tempted to bring it into the pulpit on Sunday...

Some of you will be watching the HBO mini-series "Boardwalk Empire."

There's a review of it in the Atlantic City Press which includes these lines:

The most glaring, obnoxious, maddening inaccuracy, a purposeful slight, but worth noting nonetheless: the Ritz-Carlton did not exist when Prohibition began. And it doesn’t look anything like this.

The hotel opened in June 1921, a year and a half after the HBO series begins. The real Ritz-Carlton, still standing, now known as Ritz Condominiums at Iowa Avenue and the Boardwalk, features a brick, neo-Georgian façade and rectangular features.

You will not see this Ritz-Carlton in the HBO series. In its place, look for the resemblance to the long-demolished Marlborough Blenheim Hotel — built in the early 1900s of reinforced concrete, the façade a Moorish theme featuring domes and chimneys.

In the HBO series, what is essentially the Marlborough Blenheim has that Ritz name slapped across the front, and you’re supposed to believe that this is the Ritz. Maybe that works for unassuming HBO viewers from, say, Duluth, Minn., trying to find a reprieve from cold, gray monotony.

But anyone who’s spent a day working in Atlantic City’s hotel industry will know better.

Ah, but let us remember Nucky Thompson’s first rule of storytelling — not letting the truth get in the way of a good story.

And why does it matter to me? Janice and I spent part of our honeymoon at the Marlborough Blenheim, the gift of my grandparents, the Whites, whose family owned it. I grew up going there every summer, indeed my earliest memories are of an apartment in the hotel where we lived in the late 1940's. The hotel's address? Park Place and Boardwalk.

--Jack Lohr, Interim Pastor

PS: It's still very engaging television.