By Bruce Klauber
If a survey were ever taken about the least controversial thing in the history of Atlantic City, the rolling chair, a part of the Atlantic City landscape for more than 100 years, would have to be among the top 10. After all, how could a chair with wheels on it generate any controversy? Well, it can, and it did.
There are two stories about how the rolling chair was invented. One is that a Philadelphia-based baby carriage maker named Harry Shill designed the first rolling chair as we know it sometime in the 1880s. The first, simple version of the chair, which was basically just a chair with wheels attached to it, was initially used as a wheelchair for senior citizens and invalids. Shill’s chair was made of wicker with a canopy and could hold three people.
Several of the grand hotels got wind of Shill’s invention and began buying them up and providing them to guests. Several of the wealthier guests bought their own. Some of the more enterprising visitors bought several and began renting them out. In 1881, the first rolling chair was licensed for use in Atlantic City. Shill formed his own company named Blue Shill, and it soon became the city’s top rolling chair rental operation.
The second version is that the chairs were introduced at a convention held in Atlantic City in 1876, and that a businessman named William Hayday was the first entrepreneur to rent them out. The Harry Shill version of the story seems closer to the truth.
At first, the passengers were responsible for getting someone to push the thing up and down the Boardwalk, but as the rental companies grew, rolling chair pushers were hired. A rolling chair pusher dress code, which called for jackets and white shirts, was soon mandated. The dress code issue would be one of the factors in the rolling chair controversy years later. No matter. By 1925 or thereabouts, it’s been said that there were over 3,000 rolling chairs in operation in Atlantic City.
Despite the challenges that Atlantic City faced in the 1960s and 1970s, the years before legalized gambling, the rolling chair business was thriving. Absecon resident Lee Mendell and his wife Donna worked for the Blue Shill rolling chair operation in the 1970s. Donna worked in the payroll department, and recalled that the company was then employing more than 100 people. Lee worked what was called “the rail,” which referred to the rolling chairs that were lined up along the Boardwalk from Texas Avenue, then Blue Shill’s headquarters, down to Chelsea. Lee and others on the crew dealt with almost 100 chairs, seven days a week.
“It was great exercise for those involved in college sports,” Lee Mendell remembered. “When the rolling chairs were taken in for the night, we had to move them up a ramp to Blue Shill’s storage facility. “It was quite a workout.”
The controversy began in 2015 when the first electric boardwalk trams were licensed for use.
“Atlantic City plans to introduce new standards governing both rolling chairs and boardwalk trams,” said a 2015 news story in The Press of Atlantic City. “But Dale Finch, who directs the city’s License and Inspection department, said there’s room for both. City Council is scheduled to introduce a transportation ordinance overhaul, first discussed by Mayor Don Guardian.”
The city hired Matthew Daus, one-time head of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, as an adviser.
The transportation ordinance required all chair operators to wear uniforms, be drug-free, and pass a basic English test that Dale Finch’s department would design. Additionally, the chairs were required to be kept clean, and operators would be allowed to work one, 10-hour shift per day. And get this: A rolling chair operator would not be permitted to sit in a rolling chair for more than a few minutes unless it rained.
Though the chairs would share the boardwalk “center ribbon” with the trams, it was estimated that the ordinance would likely reduce rolling chair licenses from 302 to 203. Finch, defending the new ordinance, claimed that many of the rules and regulations had “been on the books for years,” but were rarely enforced.
The new boardwalk trams also had plenty of regulations, but it was clear to many in the rolling chair business that the proposed rules and restrictions signaled the beginning of the end for one of Atlantic City’s most beloved traditions.
John Taimanglo, who managed the Ocean Rolling Chair company, holder of 150 chair licenses back in 2015, said at the time that both the regulations and the reduction in the number of licenses issued would make it harder for his business to work.
“It’s unbecoming of a director to do all this,” Taimanglo said of Finch at the time. “Rolling chairs are the oldest and largest transportation business in this city. Now they want to do away with it, slowly but surely.”
Finch claimed he didn’t want to see rolling chairs replaced by trams. He maintained that they could co-exist if they cooperate with each other.
“We’re trying to upgrade the chair business to be much more professional than it has been,” Finch said. “Visiting the Boardwalk should be a high point for visitors. Rolling chairs have a strong nostalgic appeal and they absolutely have a place in the city’s future.”
Ocean Rolling Chair company is still in business by the way.
In the end, none of this would matter. In the spring of 2015, the first electric trams appeared on the Boardwalk.
According to a March, 2015 report in the Philly Voice, “Five neon green electric trams are now shuttling passengers up and down Atlantic City’s boardwalk, joining the historic, manually pushed wicker rolling chairs, which have given sore-footed tourists a lift down the boards since the resort’s heyday. The rolling chairs will remain in operation, but the number of permits may be decreased.”
Today, it’s rare to see even one rolling chair on the Boardwalk. It quickly became clear, beginning 10 years ago, that the trams were faster, more convenient, and probably cheaper than boardwalk transport via rolling chair. The rolling chair, like Atlantic City’s grand hotels, art deco movie palaces, Tony Grant’s Stars of Tomorrow, Captain Starns, Hackney’s and Lou’s in Ventnor, have become a part of the city’s history.
The lyrics to the song, “On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City” include these lines: “There, where the saltwater air out a lady’s charms, there on the rolling chair he’ll roll right into your arms.”
As it stands today, the “there on the rolling chair” line should read: “There on the tram.”
Bruce Klauber is the author of four books, an award-winning music journalist, concert and record producer and publicist, producer of the Warner Brothers and Hudson Music “Jazz Legends” film series, and performs both as a drummer and vocalist.
