Steel Pier, Atlantic City: Showplace of the Nation »

Steve Liebowitz -- who spent every summer on the Jersey Shore since age 3 -- has been researching Atlantic City entertainment history and the Steel Pier for many years. He has written articles for the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Jewish Times, and Generations, the journal of the Jewish Museum of Maryland. He wrote about the old days of Wildwood, NJ in that Shore town's newspaper for six years.

After writing and producing commercials for CBS Radio, he wrote, co-produced and co-hosted "The Rock & Leebo Show" and has now gone out on his own with his comedy sports program "The Leebo Show" heard in Baltimore.

A graduate of the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, he has also painted animation cels in Chicago's Cioni Studio. Steve is a student of old theaters and show business history and is involved with historic preservation as a member of the Theatre Historical Society of America.

He lives outside of Baltimore with his wife Andrea (where he dreams of living near an ocean and a boardwalk). He considers the Jersey Shore his second home, and says he knows Shore history, the boardwalks, and the towns like the back of his hand.

It was aptly called the "Showplace of the Nation" and it was all that and more.

For much of the 20th century Steel Pier in Atlantic City was the center of American entertainment on the East Coast.

Nearly every big-name entertainer - from John Philip Sousa and his band to Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra and the Rolling Stones - played there. And nearly every form of entertainment that could be imagined took place at Steel Pier: high wire acts, people being shot out of cannons, the Diving Bell that took you to the sea floor.

There was the Marine Ballroom, and there was rock and roll. There were circus-like animal acts - "Rex The Wonder Dog," a 70-ton Whale, Fortune-Telling Parakeets, Wild Animal Babies, and Boxing Cats.

Steel Pier was an incredible combination of Broadway, Miami, Las Vegas, Hollywood, Barnum and Bailey, and a state fair - "All For One Low Admission." Crowds were drawn from the entire country. The renown of Steel Pier was so great that A-list performers chose the Pier over other venues.

This all-in-one entertainment Mecca, novel in its day, has never been matched, not even at latter-day theme parks. Where else could you take the entire family for a day and see the World of Tomorrow, Sousa and his band, a bear on a bicycle, the High Diving Horses, take a ride below the sea, spend the evening in the marine ballroom, and see a movie - all for one ticket? It was a colossal offering of escape, popular culture, fun and fantasy - experienced on a great pier reaching out into the sea.

Author Steve Liebowitz begins with a brief history of seaside entertainment piers, and competing piers in Atlantic City (such as Million Dollar,Heinz, and Steeplechase) and carries us through incarnations of Steel Pier into the late 20th century.

Filled with 227 photographs and other images (many in color), this large-format book chronicles the rise of one of America's most remarkable entertainment venues - "A Vacation In Itself," as the advertising slogan went. For three-quarters of the last century there was nothing like it.

The SandPaper

almost as much fun as a day on Steel Pier, and as close as you can get to it in the 21st century.