Edward L. Bader, mayor of Atlantic City from 1924 to 1927, drove the vision for Convention Hall during the city's roaring peak as America's premier seaside resort. The architectural firm Lockwood Greene designed a structure that was, at the time, the largest interior space with an unobstructed view ever built. Each pair of trusses spans 350 feet and weighs 220 tons. The barrel ceiling, decorated with painted aluminum tiles meant to resemble Roman baths, extends over 196,000 square feet. The building's forward section angles slightly to align with the Boardwalk, while the hall itself follows the street grid, a subtle acknowledgment that this building serves two masters: the sea and the city. Bader died before construction finished. His hall outlived him by a century. It earned recognition as a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1983 and a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1987, one of the few surviving buildings from Atlantic City's golden age.

For sixty-four years, Boardwalk Hall was where America crowned its beauty queens. The Miss America Pageant, founded in Atlantic City in 1921, called the hall home from 1940 through 2004, returned in 2013, and held its last edition there for the 2019 competition. The pageant made the hall famous, but the hall hosted far more than tiaras. In August 1964, the Democratic National Convention filled these seats to nominate Lyndon B. Johnson as the party's presidential candidate, nine months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That same month, the Beatles held one of their largest concerts of their first American tour here. The Rolling Stones filmed their Steel Wheels Tour concert for pay-per-view in 1989, a broadcast remembered as much for the technical mishap that cut off viewers during "Satisfaction" as for the performance itself. Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Celine Dion, the Who, all played the hall. So did Judy Garland, twice, in 1961.

The hall's sporting history reads like a highlight reel of twentieth-century combat. Mike Tyson defended his heavyweight championship here multiple times, including the legendary ninety-one-second knockout of previously undefeated Michael Spinks on June 27, 1988. Evander Holyfield defeated George Foreman here in 1991. Sugar Ray Leonard, Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather Jr., and Roberto Duran all fought under this roof. Professional wrestling planted its flag when the World Wrestling Federation staged WrestleMania IV and V in 1988 and 1989, drawing crowds of over 18,000 each night. The hall hosted the nation's first indoor football field in 1930, the first major college bowl game played indoors in 1964 (the Liberty Bowl, where Utah routed West Virginia 32-6 on four inches of real grass laid over concrete), and the first regulation indoor soccer match in 1965. Monica Seles chose the hall for her emotional return to tennis in 1995, two years after being stabbed on court, defeating Martina Navratilova in straight sets.

The Midmer-Losh pipe organ, nicknamed Poseidon, was constructed between 1929 and 1932 and remains the world's largest musical instrument. Its console has seven manuals and over 1,200 stop tabs. The Grand Ophicleide stop is the loudest organ pipe ever built. Because sound travels so slowly across the hall's vast interior, the organ chambers could not extend more than halfway back from the stage without creating an audible delay. Engineers solved this by placing two chambers in the space between the outer roof and the ceiling. The organ survived decades of neglect but not the 1944 Great Atlantic Hurricane, which badly damaged it. A $90-million hall renovation in 2001 rendered the instrument completely inoperable through sheer carelessness. Restoration began in 2007. As of 2024, roughly sixty percent of its functionality has been recovered, with full restoration projected for 2030. When Poseidon eventually sings again at full power, the sound will fill a room that was engineered specifically to contain it.

Atlantic City's golden age faded long ago. The grand hotels crumbled. The casinos rose and some fell. But Boardwalk Hall endures, a National Historic Landmark still hosting events a century after its construction. Stockton University holds graduation ceremonies here. The New Jersey state wrestling tournament fills the seats annually. Midget car racing has been a fixture since 1938. The Ultimate Fighting Championship has returned five times. Billboard named it the top-grossing mid-sized arena in America in 2003 and 2004. The hall sits at 14,770-seat capacity, intimate by modern arena standards, but grand in a way that newer venues rarely achieve. Its barrel vault ceiling, its Roman-inspired tiles, its impossible clear span, all speak to an era when Atlantic City built things to last and built them to astonish.