For much of the 20th century the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, NJ, was the center of American entertainment on the East Coast. There were big bands, movies, sideshows, acrobats, flag-pole sitters, Frank Sinatra, Miss America — and throngs of people lining up to get a seat so they could watch brave horses and riders dive into a pool of water. It was aptly called the “Showplace of the Nation” and it was all that and more. This all-in-one entertainment mecca has never been matched. Where else could you take the entire family for a day and see fortune-telling parakeets, the World of Tomorrow, John Philip Sousa and his band, a bear on a bicycle, World Famous Diving Horses, take a ride below the sea in the Diving Bell, spend the evening in the marine ballroom, and take in a movie — all for one ticket? It was a colossal offering of escape, popular culture, fun and fantasy.Today the golden age of the Pier seems a world apart. Yet it was an institution — a destination not to be missed — an empire of grand-thinking impresarios, oddities and glamour that meshed into one attainable summer destination.Steel Pier evokes a time when more really was more, a time when there was so much invention, talent and industry that it could only be experienced in one place —at the edge of the continent, in a city that took its name from a vast ocean, on a great pier reaching out into the sea.