Marvin Gardens

 I just finished this wonderful essay by John McPhee.  McPhee is playing a game of Monopoly with a friend of his, an old monopoly competitor from years of yore, a time when life was simpler and everyone played board games.  As MePhee plays the game, he reminisces about his time visiting Atlantic City, the town the monopoly game board is based on.  His reminisces mix history with his own imaginings of how things must have been at one time living in Atlantic City.  What is remarkable about the essay is how fluidly McPhee mixes history and imaginings into the game he's playing.   

McPhee is in search of Marvin Gardens, one of the squares -- the last yellow square to be precise -- on the game board.  All the squares are streets and locations in Atlantic City.  He has been there and found each and every one of those streets and places, except, of course, Marvin Gardens.  Marvin Gardens he can't find anywhere, and no one he asks has ever heard of it.  (I guess the residents of Atlantic City don't play Monopoly.). Eventually McPhee finds it, but he doesn't tell us how.  It's not in Atlantic City.  It's a housing development sub-section somewhere else in New Jersey.  What?  Huh?  I'm thinking the original developer ran out of places in Atlantic City, and he needed one more to maintain the square, so he went driving one day through the jersey countryside until he found a pretty name.  Or maybe he lived there?  Or maybe we will never know?

The essay is a prize and a prize winner, and I hope to be as creative as McPhee with my writing when I grow up.  Reading it got my wanderlust all in a flutter, so I looked up the game of Monopoly in Wikipedia.  Turns out Monopoly is a successor game to the "Landlord's Game," a game whose inventor's idea was to condemn monopolies while promoting Henry George's economic and taxation ideas.  You can look up Henry George for yourself.  He's worth a read. Thousands and thousands of people attended his funeral in the early 20th century, so at one time his ideas were popular. But now he is a forgotten man.  What I found remarkable about this history is the irony in it.  Here we have an anti-capitalist, anti-monopoly game, and out of it comes its successor, Monopoly, which is the all time capitalist game, whose sole goal is one winner, one landlord, one monopoly left standing.  Have to love that twist.