Before Atlantic City was casinos, it was a booming Edwardian seaside resort with the first boardwalk in America. And before sand sculpting became a competitive art form sponsored by tourism boards, it was a busking trade — “sand men” who sculpted life-size tableaus in the dunes just off the boardwalk and lived on tips.
Thea Applebaum Licht’s collection on The Public Domain Review gathers the postcards that preserve this vanished trade:
- Artists like James J. Taylor (who styled himself “The Sandman, Atlantic City, N.J.” in a suit and derby hat) and the one-armed sculptor Owen Golden worked in saltwater-soaked sand, carving religious scenes, animals, mermaids, and soldiers.
- Postcards urged viewers not to forget the worker: “Don’t Forget the Worker” appeared as a refrain, alongside the boast that sand art was “The Key-Note of All Art.”
- African American sand artists crossed the color line to work on segregated beaches — but many surviving postcards of them were retouched by publishers to make the artists appear white, a documented industry practice.
By the early 1940s, the city had regulated sand sculpting heavily, banning religious and nude figures and requiring permits. Some artists tried cement coatings to make their work permanent, sparking debates about authenticity. Then a hurricane in 1944 redrew the shoreline, destroying the boardwalk and the sand men’s displays in one sweep.
A small, resonant piece of American vernacular culture — labor history, racial history, and the history of an art form that was always meant to wash away.