05/09/2026
Today......years ago
September 5, 1963
Hackneyās Restaurant
Maine Avenue and Boardwalk ā Atlantic City, NJ
The original restaurant was destroyed by fire on September 5, 1963
Hackney's restaurant started in 1912, over 100 years ago, as a clam shack. But it grew so big so fast that by 1929, the restaurant had 3,200 seats, and took up a full block of the Atlantic City Boardwalk along Absecon Inlet.
That made it the biggest seafood restaurant in the world in its day - and by some tellings, the biggest restaurant of any kind. Despite that shocking capacity, it also had lines around the block on summer nights.
Partly because of that vast footprint, - Hackney's became famous well beyond the borders of the World's Famous Playground.
Harry Hackney advertised: "You could open up a newspaper in the Midwest and see a Hackney's ad"
Harry had catch phrases: "Eat Where They Are Caught." "Home of the Purified Lobster." "Famous Garden of Seafood." And "Fishing Out the Window"- all those and more marketing slogans were either on signs in and around the restaurant, or plastered all over the menus.
The menus were crowded with choices from chicken livers to lobster thermidor, were another advertising vehicle - one that could travel widely. For decades, every one carried a prominent message: "This is your menu. You may take it with you."
"He wanted you to leave it on the trolley, or the jitney, or in a rolling chair on the Boardwalk," "He wanted you to take the menu, and tell your friends about it back home in Illinois."
Anything he could put that lobster on, he did, including the plates, cocktail glasses, swizzle sticks, sugar packs, pocket protectors, ashtrays, delivery trucks, a sailing yacht (that gave rides to paying customers), and much more. Many places have advertised on match packs, obviously, and Hackney's did too - but Hackney's also had its messages put on individual matches within the packs..
Hackney's started, grew, thrived and suffered - it took massive damage from the legendary storms of 1944 and 1962, but a 1963 fire did even worse by the landmark.
The 1963 fire was on the night of the Miss America Pageant - another Atlantic City institution, which Harry had been a huge supporter of before he died, in 1945.
The restaurant shut down until 1965, when it was reborn as a smaller, more modern building. But by then, Atlantic City was obviously struggling itself - and the Inlet worst of all as it tried desperately to recover from that '62 northeaster.
The rebuilt one was never that big. If you crunched people in, we had maybe 1,500 seats, while they could squeeze in as many as 3,600 people at one time in the old place, which was actually a series of neighboring buildings Harry bought up and incorporated into Hackney's.
The demand diminished over the years - as the neighborhood around it did the same.
As Atlantic City went, so the restaurant went, the family sold Hackney's in the mid-1970s.
Hackney's had "153 cooks at your service" in its open kitchen - just one of Harry Hackney's many innovations that are now trends, if not institutions, in the restaurant business. And Hackney's staff pictures on the Boardwalk show an army of white-wearing waitresses that could probably dwarf that number of cooks.
After the family sold out, the new owners kept running a restaurant into the early 1980s. But they gave up and closed it, then sold again in 1993, a year before the new owners made news by announcing plans for a $2 million renovation that would again cut the size of Hackney's in half - down from the 15,000 square feet of the rebuilt, post-1965 incarnation.
But while the restaurant sat empty beside the Boardwalk for years - with tables neatly lined up and covered, looking like it could open again with the simple turn of a key - it never served another meal.
News reports show the rusting steel frame was still there at least into the late 1990s, but when it was torn down, the restaurant once "as famous as the Boardwalk" drew little notice - even among the family that ran it so lovingly for so long.
Now there's no sign left that Hackney's was ever there - and the section of Boardwalk it dominated is closed to walkers by decades of storm damage and neglect.
