When Atlantic Beach had a Pagoda Casino

If you could drive across the causeway into Atlantic Beach in the summer of 1928, the view ahead would have looked very different from the beach town we know today.

At the end of the newly developed route across Bogue Sound, visitors arrived at a seaside resort centered around what we now know as The Circle. Waiting near the ocean were two bathhouses, a large dance pavilion, amusement areas, and an unusual collection of buildings with sweeping, upturned rooflines inspired by Japanese architecture.

A newspaper advertisement that spring called the centerpiece the Pagoda Casino.

And Atlantic Beach, as a destination motorists could reach directly by car, was just getting started.

Bringing the automobile to the beach

People had been coming to Bogue Banks for recreation long before 1928. Earlier bathing pavilions and resorts included developments at Money Island Beach and Asbury Beach, but reaching them generally required traveling by boat.

That began to change in 1926, when a group of Morehead City and Beaufort investors formed companies to develop a new resort on Bogue Banks and construct a bridge across Bogue Sound.

By the summer of 1928, the new Atlantic Beach resort was open.

The significance of that bridge is difficult to overstate. For the first time, visitors could drive their automobiles from the mainland directly onto Bogue Banks. The Town of Atlantic Beach credits that accessibility with helping the new development prosper while some of the earlier beach resorts declined.

The heart of the new resort became the area we still call The Circle.

“The Lure of the Sea”

Months before opening day, Atlantic Beach, Inc. was already selling North Carolinians on the possibilities of a seaside vacation.

A remarkable advertisement appeared in The Smithfield Herald on March 27, 1928, beneath the headline “The Lure of the Sea.”

The advertisement announced that the toll bridge across Bogue Sound had been completed and promoted the ability for motorists to travel through Morehead City, cross the bridge, and reach the ocean.

Then came the attractions.

The company advertised a Pagoda Casino, scheduled to open June 1, describing it as a Japanese-inspired building with a wide piazza overlooking the sea. Despite the word “casino,” the advertisement specifically said the building was devoted to dancing.

It also promised “a thousand bath houses” and a Midway for amusements.

Atlantic Beach’s later official history describes the resort somewhat differently, identifying two primary bathhouse buildings, one for men and one for women, separated by the large ballroom-style Pavilion. The 1928 advertisement may have been referring to individual bathing or changing accommodations when it promoted its much larger number.

Either way, the scale of the plans was ambitious.

The advertisement boasted about ocean breezes, fishing, hard-packed sand, and year-round motoring. It was selling more than a day at the beach. Atlantic Beach, Inc. was selling the idea of a new North Carolina seaside destination.

A beach unlike anything around it

The architecture may have been the most unusual part.

The buildings surrounding the new resort were constructed in an Oriental or Japanese-inspired style, with dramatic rooflines that distinguished the development from anything that had come before it on Bogue Banks.

The Town of Atlantic Beach describes the complex as being known for its Pagoda design.

Picture arriving at The Circle in the late 1920s and seeing those distinctive buildings against the Atlantic Ocean, with music coming from the dance pavilion, bathers headed toward the water, and motorists arriving across the new bridge.

For a brief period, that was Atlantic Beach.

Very brief.

The fire that changed everything

On July 20, 1929, fire swept through the development.

Nearly the entire Pagoda-style complex was destroyed.

Only a small office building survived.

That surviving building has an extraordinary story of its own. It was later moved to an oceanfront lot on West Boardwalk and used for years as the summer residence of Atlantic Beach managers.

Known today as the Pagoda House, the Town of Atlantic Beach identifies it as the oldest documented structure in present-day Atlantic Beach.

The grand Pagoda resort itself was gone after barely a year.

The timing could hardly have been worse. The stock market crash and Great Depression followed later in 1929, and the original development encountered serious financial trouble.

Atlantic Beach would rebuild.

In 1930, two new bathhouses, another dance hall called the Casino, and several drink stands were constructed, and the beach reopened for business.

The elaborate Pagoda architecture, however, belonged to that brief first chapter.

The Circle remains

Nearly a century later, much of Atlantic Beach has changed.

The dance pavilions are gone. The original bathhouses are gone. Generations of hotels, cottages, restaurants, amusements, piers, and beach businesses have come and gone around them.

But The Circle is still The Circle.

It remains one of Atlantic Beach’s most recognizable gathering places, sitting at essentially the same focal point envisioned when the new resort opened in 1928.

That makes the old newspaper advertisement especially fascinating.

Its writers were describing Atlantic Beach before generations of families had created memories here, before beach cottages lined much of Bogue Banks, and before the causeway became such a familiar part of arriving at the coast.

They were advertising something brand new.

A bridge.

A beach accessible by automobile.

A Midway.

Bathhouses.

And, for one short and remarkable season, a Japanese-inspired Pagoda Casino overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

It is hard to imagine today.

But for a moment in the summer of 1928, that was Atlantic Beach.