Atlantic City, NJ
Opened 1941 as Naval Air Station Atlantic City. Co-located with the FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center, the agency's main R&D facility. Atlantic City's boardwalk, beaches, and casinos drive tourism; the airport serves as a NYC-region alternative.
The first boardwalk in the world opened in Atlantic City in 1870 — built to keep beach sand out of the hotels and railcars — and the city became the great American seaside playground, the "World's Playground," at its height in the early 20th century. Its street names became so iconic that they were borrowed for the board game Monopoly (Boardwalk, Park Place, the rest). The skyline of casino towers rose in the late 1970s when New Jersey legalized gambling, the second US city after Las Vegas. The wide boardwalk, the Steel Pier amusement rides jutting over the surf, the casinos, and the long barrier-island beach are the draw — a faded-and-revived monument to American leisure on the Jersey Shore.
In the most densely populated state in the country sits a wilderness most Americans don't know exists: the Pine Barrens, over a million acres of pine-oak forest, cedar swamps, and tea-colored rivers covering roughly a fifth of New Jersey. The sandy, acidic soil grows pines instead of farms — early colonists called it "barren" — and beneath it lies the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer, 17 trillion gallons of some of the purest water in the country. It's a place of cranberry bogs and blueberry fields, ghost towns from the old bog-iron industry, and the legend of the Jersey Devil. Tannins from the cedar stain the streams the color of dark tea. From the air it's a startling carpet of unbroken green in the middle of the Boston-Washington megalopolis.
At the very southern tip of New Jersey, where Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic, Cape May has been a summer resort since the 1760s — the oldest seaside resort in the country — and after a great fire in 1878 it rebuilt all at once in high Victorian style. The result is the largest collection of Victorian "painted lady" houses in the United States, the whole town a National Historic Landmark of gingerbread trim and wraparound porches. It's also one of the premier birdwatching spots in North America: Cape May is a funnel point on the Atlantic Flyway where migrating hawks, songbirds, and monarch butterflies concentrate before crossing the bay. The 1859 Cape May Lighthouse and the "diamond"-strewn beaches (Cape May quartz pebbles) round it out.
The 1921 Hangar No. 1 at Lakehurst — National Historic Landmark, 966 feet long, large enough to hold the Hindenburg with room to spare. Where four U.S. Navy rigid airships (Shenandoah, Akron, Macon, plus borrowed Los Angeles) were based 1921-1939. The actual 1937 disaster site is marked by a chain-link outline of where Hindenburg fell, with a memorial plaque listing the 36 dead. The Navy Lakehurst Historical Society runs guided tours by appointment (security clearance required — it's an active military base). Among the largest interior volumes of any wood-frame structure ever built, the hangar still has the original "ship" mooring rails on its floor. The most famous 32 seconds in aviation history happened 200 yards from the front door.