Longport occupies the southernmost mile or so of Absecon Island, the barrier island that holds Atlantic City and its smaller neighbors. From the air, the island narrows to a thin point here, the Atlantic on one side and the inlet on the other, with a thread of road running down the middle. The Dolores G. Cooper Bridge - known locally as the Longport-Somers Point Boulevard - vaults across to the mainland and the small town of Somers Point, a connection so essential that for much of the year it carries more traffic out of Longport than the town has residents. The geography enforces a kind of intimacy. There are no major highways. The only numbered roads are minor county routes. Thirteen and a half miles of streets cover the entire borough, and the municipality maintains nearly all of them itself.

Longport's ZIP code, 08403, regularly lands on lists of New Jersey's most expensive. The 2018 average property tax bill - $10,872 - was the highest in Atlantic County, well above the statewide average of $8,767. But the wealth that pays those bills is mostly seasonal. The houses, many of them substantial three-story shore homes raised on pilings against the threat of storm surge, sit dark for nine months of the year. The average household size hovers below two people. Nearly forty percent of households are people living alone. Walk down a Longport street in February and the wind off the Atlantic is the loudest thing you will hear. Walk down the same street on July Fourth and you will struggle to find a parking spot.

Longport runs on the Walsh Act commission form of municipal government, an early twentieth-century reform that consolidated executive and legislative power into a handful of elected officials. Only 30 of New Jersey's 564 municipalities still use it. Three commissioners, elected at-large to four-year terms on a non-partisan basis, divide the work of running the town. One takes Public Works, another Public Safety, the third Revenue and Finance. They then vote among themselves for which of them will serve as mayor. The system is suited to small places, where the line between citizen and official can stay thin. Politically the borough leans deeply Republican - well over sixty percent of presidential votes have gone to the GOP candidate in every recent cycle, in a county that splits much more evenly.

For a town of fewer than a thousand year-round residents, Longport's roster of associated names runs surprisingly long. Thomas Cruse, born in 1857, served as a brigadier general in the United States Army and received the Medal of Honor for his actions at the 1882 Battle of Big Dry Wash, the last major engagement of the Apache Wars in Arizona Territory. James Tate, born 1910, became the mayor of Philadelphia from 1962 to 1972, serving through the city's most turbulent decade. Sean Morey writes and performs the kind of novelty songs that radio DJs still play. Architect Paul Steelman designs casinos around the world. And the borough has produced its share of cautionary tales - two Pennsylvania politicians, Leland Beloff and Louis Johanson, both lost their offices to federal corruption convictions, the latter caught up in the Abscam sting that ensnared seven members of Congress in 1980.

One of the most pragmatic stories in Longport involves children most of the year are not even there. The borough operates no schools of its own. Kindergarten through eighth grade students attend Margate City Schools next door under a sending arrangement. High school used to mean Atlantic City, but in 2014 the borough successfully petitioned the New Jersey Department of Education to redirect its handful of high schoolers south across the bridge to Ocean City High School instead. The reason was straightforward: Ocean City charged about 25 percent less in tuition per student, and projected savings ran to $128,000 over the first five years. For a borough with roughly ten high school students sent out each year, the calculation mattered. Small places have to count carefully. The wind comes off the Atlantic. The summer ends. The houses lock up. The year-round nine hundred remain.