"Atlantic City was Disneyland before there even was a Disneyland," wrote Temple historian Bryant Simon, author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America, in a New Republic op-ed. Yet behind the fantasy, he argued, "there was always the reality of a city, a place of department stores and pawn shops, the well-heeled and the down and out, tourists and locals, black and white." Hurricane Sandy, wrote Simon, "brought the tensions between the two Atlantic Citys to the forefront, again."