John McShain - the son of a Philadelphia building contractor who would later become known as the Man Who Built Washington for his work on the Jefferson Memorial, the Pentagon expansion, and the rebuilding of the White House - was 32 when he built the Claridge, which was designed by the Philadelphia architectural firm Ritter and Shay. The 24-story tower contained 400 rooms when it opened. Its design departed sharply from the spreading Beaux-Arts hotels around it, opting instead for the slender vertical proportions of a Manhattan skyscraper. The 1930 opening was unfortunate timing: the Depression was already underway, and the city's vacation economy was slowing. But the Claridge survived through the 1930s, prospered through the war years, and reached its peak in the 1950s. Marilyn Monroe stayed there as a judge of the Miss America pageant. When Atlantic City's tourist economy collapsed in the 1960s, the Claridge stayed open as a hotel while older properties closed or were demolished around it. No new hotels would rise on the Boardwalk between the 1930 Claridge and the Howard Johnson's of the 1960s.

In February 1977, a Connecticut investment group led by F. Francis D'Addario bought the Claridge with intentions of converting it to a casino. They quickly realized they needed a partner with deep pockets and Nevada gaming experience. They got both in 1979 when they brought in the Del E. Webb Corporation - the firm founded by the Arizona contractor who had pioneered the Sun City retirement community model and who had owned a string of Nevada casinos including the Mint in downtown Las Vegas. Governor Brendan Byrne was openly skeptical of the renovation, calling it a patch-and-paint job and arguing the old hotels should be torn down. Del Webb pressed ahead anyway, expanded the tower with 200 new rooms, and opened the Del Webb's Claridge Hotel and Casino in July 1981. The casino floor was themed for London - red phone booths, Big Ben motifs, a 600-seat showroom that booked Aretha Franklin, Donny and Marie, Billy Crystal, Penn and Teller, Joan Rivers, the Isley Brothers, the 5th Dimension. By 1982 Del Webb had bought out the original investors. The Claridge was, by Atlantic City standards, a small casino - and that proved its long-term problem.

By the late 1980s, much larger casinos were opening along the boardwalk and the Claridge had no room to expand vertically and no land to expand outward. To compensate, the hotel built the elevated People Mover in 1988 - the moving sidewalk that connected the Claridge through the air to the boardwalk and to the neighboring Sands. In 2001, Park Place Entertainment bought the property. A year later it formally folded the Claridge into Bally's Atlantic City next door as the Claridge Tower. The hotel kept its 500 rooms but lost its identity. In 2009, with all the original Claridge restaurants shuttered, Caesars Entertainment tried to revive the casino floor by rebranding it theRIDGE and modeling it after a dance club - dance floor and DJ at the center, table games arrayed around it. A $20 million restoration followed. None of it worked. theRIDGE closed in winter 2012, and the tower continued only as hotel space for Bally's guests.

On October 29, 2013, Caesars announced it was selling the Claridge tower to TJM Properties of Clearwater, Florida. TJM specialized in revitalizing distressed hotels in resort markets. The sale closed on February 24, 2014. The Claridge reopened in May 2014 as what it had been at the very beginning - a stand-alone hotel without casino gambling, separated again from the Bally's complex next door. It joined Radisson Hotels in October 2016 and disaffiliated a few years later to operate independently. The architecture of the original 1930 tower remained largely intact. The neon Claridge sign on the roof, lit for nearly nine decades by then, still announced the building's name to the Boardwalk below. Chicken Bone Beach Jazz - the concert series named for the segregated stretch of Atlantic City beach where Black bathers were confined into the 1950s - now performs at the hotel during the cooler months. The Claridge's reinvention as a non-gaming property was an oddity at first. As Atlantic City worked through its casino bust, it slowly started to look like a model.

In 2023, the New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission approved a new tenant for the Claridge: the High Roller Cannabis Dispensary and Lounge, leasing 10,000 square feet of space on the Park Place side of the building. New Jersey had legalized recreational cannabis in 2022 but prohibited public consumption almost everywhere. High Roller became the first combination dispensary and on-site consumption lounge in the state - retail downstairs, lounge upstairs, separate entrance from the hotel proper. The renovation included extensive security retrofits required by the NJCRC. The lounge opened in the summer of 2023. A second cannabis dispensary, Design 710, opened in the neighboring Park Place Building that August. The Claridge, almost a century after its 1930 opening, was once again ahead of the curve - the same hotel that had been the last great Boardwalk skyscraper of the pre-war era was now hosting the first legal on-site consumption space in a state of nine million people. The tower is still slender. The lit sign still shines. The Skyscraper by the Sea is, against most odds, still standing.