State Senator Emerson Richards represented New Jersey's Atlantic County in the legislature for many years. He was also one of the most knowledgeable amateur organ designers in the world. When Atlantic City's Convention Hall was being planned in the late 1920s, Richards saw an opportunity. The hall needed an organ. The space presented impossible acoustic challenges - the speed of sound itself meant that pipes placed near the back of the hall would arrive at the front nearly half a second after pipes at the stage. Richards's design was an attempt to solve all of these problems at once. His first proposal called for 43,000 pipes in six chambers. The cost exceeded the $300,000 budget. He revised it down to 29,000. Eventually two additional Forward chambers were added, bringing the count to 33,112. The pipe chambers were placed in the auditorium ceiling above the stage, because placing them further back would have created unfixable synchronization problems with the speed of sound.

The console - the keyboards and controls the organist uses to play the instrument - is the largest organ console ever built. It has seven manuals, three more than a standard concert organ. The bottom two manuals (Choir and Great) extend through seven octaves rather than the standard five. The third manual (Swell) covers six octaves. The console has 1,235 stoptabs - the toggle switches that select which pipe ranks sound when a key is pressed. There are 587 flue stoptabs, 265 reed stoptabs, 35 melodic and 46 non-melodic percussion stops, 164 couplers, 18 tremulants, and a crescendo pedal that gradually adds stops to build volume. The pedalboard and the Choir and Great manuals are equipped with Second Touch - the ability to press the same key to different depths to trigger different sounds. The console requires a trained organist to physically reach across more than a meter to access all the stops.

The Grand Ophicleide in the Pedal Right division is - or was - the loudest organ stop in the world. The pipes are made of lead alloy of unusual thickness to keep them from cracking under their own sonic vibrations. The wind pressure is 100 inches of water column, roughly four times the pressure of a standard organ. When the rank is played, the sound exceeds 130 decibels at the keyboard. Guinness World Records recognized the stop as the loudest in the world until 2012, when a South Korean compressed-air instrument called the Vox Maris built for an outdoor expo took the title. Boardwalk Hall's organ also includes a 64-foot Diaphone-Dulzian rank that uses pipes so long the lowest notes are essentially infrasonic - felt through the chest rather than heard. The 64-foot stop required so many engineering compromises that the organ's first curator, Roscoe Evans, personally built the lowest pipes.

Between 1999 and 2001, Boardwalk Hall underwent a multi-year renovation. The organ curator position had been eliminated for budget reasons. Construction contractors moved through the building without any meaningful supervision regarding the instrument. Pipes were removed, stepped on, and crushed - most organ pipes are made of soft lead alloys and dent permanently under any pressure. The 32-foot Trombone stop was entombed in the building's walls when a chamber opening was sealed shut. Windlines to multiple pipe chambers were cut without documentation or replacement plans. The electrical relay for the Left Stage chamber was simply cut out. The Right Stage chamber, which had been 98% operational in 1998, was completely disabled. The 5-manual console connection was severed. Cement dust contaminated thousands of switching contacts. The damage was, by any honest accounting, catastrophic - a world-record musical instrument left in pieces by a renovation that nobody had coordinated with anyone who knew the building.

In 2013 - twelve years after the construction damage - the Auditorium Organ was heard publicly again for the first time in forty years, played during the Miss America pageant with about 15 to 20 percent of the instrument restored to working order. The Historic Organ Restoration Committee, a nonprofit, has been raising funds for a comprehensive $16 million rebuild. The work involves re-leathering every wind mechanism, repairing every damaged pipe, restoring every severed cable, and rebuilding the electrical relays from scratch. As of 2024, approximately 95 percent of the Auditorium Organ is operational again. Free thirty-minute noon concerts run from May through September. Behind-the-scenes tours run Wednesday mornings. Nathan Bryson became the fifth curator in 2015 and leads the maintenance crew. The instrument's hundredth anniversary - 2029 through 2032 - is the target for full restoration. The largest pipe organ in the world is slowly, pipe by pipe, returning to life.