The Atlantic City Historical Museum opened in 1985. Its three co-founders were Florence Valore Miller, the photographer and writer Vicki Gold Levi, and the curator Anthony Kutschera. Miller was the driving force - a longtime Atlantic City resident who had watched the city's decline through the 1970s and refused to accept that its history should be lost along with it. The original museum sat on Garden Pier, an early-twentieth-century pier that had once hosted the Miss America pageant in its earliest years. Miller and Levi assembled a collection that combined oral history, photography, and physical artifacts saved from buildings as they were demolished. The Atlantic City Historical Museum's signature accession came in April 1985, when its volunteers were given permission to salvage materials from the Apollo Theatre on South New York Avenue days before that building was torn down.

From 1939 through 1964, Al Gold worked as Atlantic City's official photographer. His job was to document the city's official events, the visiting celebrities, the boardwalk crowds, the conventions, the storms. He produced thousands of images that recorded Atlantic City's mid-twentieth-century life with the eye of a working professional rather than a tourist. The museum holds a major collection of Gold's photographs, organized by year and subject. The images show what the city looked like at its height: the convention crowds in Boardwalk Hall, the Miss America pageant on the runway, the carnival sideshows on the piers, the jitney drivers in their black-and-white striped shirts, the diving horse plunging from Steel Pier into a tank of water. Gold's archive is one of the most complete photographic records of any American resort city in that era.

Because the Miss America pageant began at Garden Pier in 1921 - and was held in Atlantic City for nearly every year until 2006, then sporadically afterward - the museum has accumulated a collection of original dresses worn by the winners. Some are evening gowns. Some are swimsuits from the era when swimsuits were the contest's signature competition garment. Some are crowns. The collection is small but unusually personal: each garment was worn at a specific moment in a specific year by a specific young woman whose life changed when she walked the runway. The dresses make Atlantic City's bid for cultural significance more tangible than any photograph. The Miss America pageant is one of the most distinctive American institutions of the twentieth century, and Atlantic City was its place of origin and its primary home.

In 2016 the museum's original Garden Pier location closed when developer Bart Blatstein - the Philadelphia businessman who would later own the Playground Pier - purchased Garden Pier and announced redevelopment plans; the museum's final day on the pier was August 6, 2016. The museum's collection went into storage. The Atlantic City Art Center, which had shared Garden Pier, moved with it. By 2019, both institutions had been relocated to Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall - the historic 1929 building at the corner of Mississippi Avenue and the boardwalk where the Miss America pageant had been held for most of its history. The combined collections were rebranded as the Atlantic City Experience. The Mr. Peanut, the Al Gold photographs, the Miss America dresses, and the Apollo Theatre relics all moved into the new space.

The Atlantic City Historical Museum has become, by accident as much as by intention, the primary repository of physical evidence for the city's storied past. Atlantic City demolishes buildings faster than most cities preserve them. The Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel was demolished in 1979. The Traymore Hotel went down in 1972. The Million Dollar Pier mansion fell in 1953. The Sands Casino was imploded in 2007. The Atlantic Club Casino closed in 2014 and was demolished. Each demolition produced salvage - hardware, signs, fixtures, photographs - that the museum acquired. The result is one of the more textured small-museum collections on the East Coast: a hundred-and-fifty years of a city that keeps tearing itself down, preserved in the building of the one institution that committed to keeping the pieces.