Ventnor Author Shares Stories of Life in 1970’s Atlantic City

The Hotel on St. James Place: Growing up in Atlantic City between the Boardwalk and the Holocaust.

It’s the first book by Ventnor’s Molly Golubcaw. A collection of short stories about life with her Polish immigrant parents in Atlantic City.

About the Author, Molly Golubcaw.

‘The Hotel on St. James Place: Growing up in Atlantic City between the Boardwalk and the Holocaust’ tells her story – a hybrid of memoir and vivid vignettes that juxtapose her parents, Holocaust survivors and proprietors of a small hotel in Atlantic City, next to some colorful characters ranging from pimps to runaways.

All promising to add up to an unforgettable journey of resilience, survival, and acceptance.

By the early 1970s Atlantic City, New Jersey had seen better days. Its heyday was decades in the past, and the uncertain promise of casinos had not yet become a reality. Shabby, rundown and even seedy were often terms used to describe the once attractive seaside resort city.

Atlantic City was not without its charms, however. The ocean and the steady sea breeze is always hard to resist. The famous Boardwalk with its shops and the Steel Pier still drew visitors. It remained a destination for mostly bargain vacationers. Once in town, travelers mixed with the drug dealers, runaways, pimps, con artists and others to create a strange tapestry.

It was vastly different than the small shtetl in Poland where Holocaust survivors Harry and Sonia Golubcow once lived. That world had been totally destroyed. When they became the proprietors of the Seacrest Hotel on St. James Place, a small walk up hotel situated less than a block from the Boardwalk, they brought their memories with them and maintained their old world ways.

Harry would often say, “Hitler was a strange matchmaker” describing his new life.

Indeed, the hotel’s colorful clientele became a sort of family, with the couple demonstrating their incredible capacity to interact with strange and quirky quests with empathy and understanding– adapting to lifestyles so foreign and opposite to their strict Jewish upbringing and alien compared to the horrors that they experienced. Along the way, they became friends, substitute parents, teachers, and in some cases, saviors to those who came to the Seacrest.

Observing all of this is Harry and Sonia’s young teenage daughter, Molly. The comings and goings of the Seacrest’s unforgettable characters unfold before her like a bizarre soap opera. Each person that passes by Harry’s front desk begins a new tale about a Seacrest Hotel guest who made an impression on Molly.

Some are sad and others dangerous, but they all have a story to tell. And they lead Molly—and us– into a darker, misfit world of Atlantic City in those days.

Let’s go to St. James Place and pay a visit to the Seacrest Hotel, as Molly Golubcow vividly remembers it. It will be an unforgettable journey.

Molly’s works have been published in several anthologies as well as in newspaper and magazines: Atlantic City Weekly, Montgomery Life, Boardwalk Journal, New Jersey Lifestyle, South Jersey, & JerseyMan. Her favorite subjects to write about center around her home, her roots – Atlantic City and New Jersey in general.