Here's the Story.

The New Jersey town made famous by Monopoly is having money troubles.

Nearly deserted by today's fun lovers, city fathers try a new approach.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Resorts International, otherwise known as Las Vegas East.

Casino gambling is approved by the voters overwhelmingly, and it's a new world.

When people think of Atlantic City today, images of bright lights, bustling casinos, and the roll of the dice come to mind.

Long before the gambling tables, this city by the sea was a destination of a different kind, a place where families strolled the boardwalk, marveling at sights and sounds that promised escape and wonder.

Among the enduring symbols of that golden age stands Convention Hall, a masterpiece of engineering and entertainment that once drew crowds for its grandeur and spectacle.

Its arches still echo with the spirit of a bygone era, serving as a reminder that Atlantic City's story is more than the flash of casino lights and the allure of easy money.

Places like Convention Hall bridge the past and present, offering hope for the city's future as a hub of inspiration, culture, community, and history.

Rising from the edge of the Atlantic Ocean where the boardwalk meets the dreams of yesteryear, stands this monument to innovation and extravagance.

Since 1929, Convention Hall has resounded with the voices of history, the music of legends, and the awe of countless visitors.

Yet hidden within its towering walls lies yet another marvel, a giant whose voice has been silent for too long, the Midmer Loesch pipe organ, the largest musical instrument in the world.

With over 33,000 pipes and nearly a century of wear, its restoration is no small feat.

A journey of craftsmanship, dedication, and the enduring power of sound and music.

This is the story of a hall, an organ, and the people who breathed and continue to breathe life into one of history's great symphonies.

[Organ music] We're actually standing next to and underneath the largest pipes in the world.

We're one of only two pipe organs that have a full-length 64-foot stop.

So low C is actually 64 feet long.

It speaks at 8 hertz per second, which is really below the point of human hearing, so it's a sound that you feel more than you hear.

The only other organ that has a full-length 64-foot stop is the Town Hall in Sydney, Australia.

So this is one of our many claims to fame.

What makes it all even more interesting, just logistically, is that everything you see in these chambers, this massive amount of stuff, all had to come through a standard household-sized 36-inch door.

The building was largely complete by 1928, so everything you see in here came through a tiny door.

So most of the large pipes actually had to be built right in the chamber where they're still standing today, which also becomes a challenge for repair if there's something wrong with them.

Those pipes were stood in place in 1929, and there's really no way to get them back out, so we have to work on stuff in place and try to repair it as best as we can.

Organ building as a whole has been much the same for hundreds of years, but yes, we take for granted a lot of things in organ building today.

Excel spreadsheets, computer-aided drafting, all of that stuff that we rely so heavily on today, they had to do that all on paper.

It was just laying things out on the remarkable efficiency with which they laid everything out.

It's easy to get to, it's easy to access, to work on.

It's really remarkable what they were able to do back in 1929.

My name is Nathan Bryson, and I'm curator of pipe organs here at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and it's my responsibility to oversee the ongoing maintenance and restoration of the two pipe organs here in this building.

I first saw the instrument probably about 10 years ago now.

It was at least 2014, if not earlier.

At that point, the organ really was not very much in a playable state.

It could make a little bit of sound, but certainly nothing that we have heard today.

But it was still just remarkable, just on the sheer scale and enormity of it.

And back then, I thought, "This has to come back to life.

This is so important, not just as a United States instrument, but as an international instrument.

This is the largest pipe organ in the world, and it's right here in Atlantic City."

Teddy Roosevelt once said, "Anyone who hasn't heard of Atlantic City is not a good citizen."

And Atlantic City has an amazing history.

And of course, we're sitting in the historic Boardwalk Hall, which was called Convention Hall, and it's a national landmark.

It was built in '29, and it has had so many things happen here.

The 1964 Democratic Convention was here.

Miss America, for many, many years, was here.

Everything you can think of.

They had a helicopter fly inside the hall.

They had the first indoor football game here.

So the place is rife with history.

That's all I can say.

We were built as the Atlantic City Convention Hall and Municipal Auditorium between 1926 and 1929.

This building was built as the world's first all-purpose entertainment and convention venue.

So a lot of the things we take for normal in a convention building now were really pioneered here in this building.

Just for example, every few feet, they'd have panels throughout the arena that had hot and cold running water, electricity, sewer, condensed air, anything you could need to potentially run a booth at that time.

And it was all pre-stated here in the building.

And again, you can see the building behind me.

It has changed slightly in the last 95 years.

The bowl that you see behind me, all those seats, that was added between 1998 and 2001.

But again, when we were first built, the entirety of the floor behind me was open from wall to wall, and it had a steeply raked balcony around the building.

And we sat 41,000 people in this space.

Broke all sorts of architectural records as it was being built.

There's over 10 million bricks used in the building.

And if you see us from the boardwalk, we're clad in limestone.

That doesn't even take into consideration the limestone cladding.

When they say they don't build them like they used to here, that is to the nth degree.

Let's see.

Let's go around this way.

Watch your step as you come around.

Wow.

This is actually one of only eight chambers.

Only one of eight chambers.

There are two main chambers to the left and right sides of the stage that have a little over 50% of the pipes in the organ.

All of the rest of the pipes in the organ are in smaller ancillary chambers all around the hall.

The designer and the architect of the instrument wanted this to really be the original surround sound.

So the pipe organ was completed before public address and significant audio systems were perfected.

So in order to bring music to what back in the day could have been 40,000 people, they wanted an organ that could stand up to 40,000 people singing.

And then they built it.

It's really amazing.

Most of the pipes on this level are the pedal pipes, the bass pipes that the organist plays with his or her feet simply because they need the most ceiling height.

So the longer the pipe, the lower the pitch.

The shorter the pipe, the higher the pitch.

Think tuba versus piccolo.

The ceiling height of this chamber in particular is about 50 feet tall.

So most of the pipes are able to stand up without any sort of adjustment.

The lowest eight pipes of the 64 foot stop that we mentioned earlier are actually mitered.

So they go up about 45 feet and then their resonators are mitered directly out towards the audience.

The pipe is actually about 30 inches by 30 inches square.

So you can literally crawl into the pipe.

I certainly don't recommend it, but you could if you wanted to.

This is another one of our many claims to fame.

This is the Grand Offaclide.

It's actually the loudest organ stop in the world.

It's voiced on 100 inches of wind, which was quadruple what anybody had even attempted at the time.

So enormously high wind pressure and speaking in pipe organ terms.

Back when the Guinness Book of World Records was here in the 1930s, they measured just the decibel output of this single rank of pipes alone at about 138 decibels, which is actually louder than a fighter jet.

So it's really, really incredible.

But this room has about five and a half million cubic feet of volume.

So it's a thrilling sound.

It's an absolute beautiful crown to the whole ensemble of the instrument.

So right now we have about 66% of the organ playing.

When I started here in September 1st of 2015, less than a quarter of the instrument functioned.

Most of what functioned back then was loud stuff.

So you could play loud or you could play soft and really nothing in between.

It was a very difficult instrument to try to make music on.

And so now we have so much more musicality, subtlety and warmth, and the capability to create an almost infinite array of sounds.

So the next few years we're really getting into the more challenging stuff.

We've done all the easy stuff.

Right now of the 66% of the organ that's playing, I'd say probably about 45% of the organ is fully restored.

The other 20 or so percent is still kind of in its original condition.

We've either just done some maintenance on it or put band-aids on it and just keeping it limping along until we can come back around and really do the full restoration that it deserves.

One of the things that I had to do when I got here was really kind of be a cheerleader.

There was a lot of work to do to get even just the next few chambers that hadn't played online.

And it took more than a year for the first sounds to even come out of that chamber.

And I had to keep convincing folks that this is going to happen and the results will be worth it.

So sometimes it's just a matter of keeping the morale up and saying, "We're almost there.

We're almost there."

And that's part of what is going to happen over the next few years.

We've done all the easy stuff, as I said, and now we're getting into some of the more challenging parts of the organ that had water damage or particular damage from metal fatigue or collapsing pipes.

So the next few percentage points aren't going to be easy ones.

They're going to be incredible ones when they come online, but now we're getting into some of the more difficult and challenging stuff.

What is the projection at this point?

Well, like everything else in the world, that depends on money.

But even if somebody were to walk in and dump several million dollars in my lap tomorrow, quite frankly, there are only a limited number of people in the world that do what we do.

And all of the other organ builders in the country, thankfully, are quite busy.

And I can't just call them all and tell them to come to Atlantic City and help us here.

So we're still years away from completion.

We've had discussions.

We're already thinking ahead to the 100th anniversary of the organ, and we're debating, is the 100th anniversary of the organ in 2029, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the contract, or 2032, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the completion of the instrument, and discussing where the celebration will be.

I think it's just a great excuse to have a party for four years.

So we have goals for 2029, where we want to be for the 100th anniversary of the signing of that contract.

And we also have goals for the completion of the organ.

I'm hopeful that in 2029, we will be able to announce that we're ready to begin the restoration of the final two chambers that are the most challenging, the echo and the fanfare, the ceiling chambers.

If we're not ready to announce that yet, then we'll use that as a catalyst to say, let's finish it.

Let's finish strong and hopefully be able to complete that by 2032.

Compare that.

Part of what we do, we do a lot of woodworking.

We do a lot of metalworking.

Part of what we do is cleaning and restoration of pipes.

So you can see how tarnished these pipes are, but if Carl holds-- Actually, this is one that Nick did.

Has already been cleaned and restored.

And you can tell how significantly cleaner and prettier and brighter that is.

So sometimes it's as simple as cosmetic restoration, but not always.

Metal fatigue over the years has caused pipes to collapse, and we have to repair those pipes.

There are a lot of perishable materials throughout the instrument, and that's really the biggest cause of failure throughout the organ, so we have to replace that material.

So there are any number of factors, woodworking, metalworking, leatherworking, all sorts of things that go into restoring a pipe organ.

This is where we do all the restorative work in the organ.

The room you're in was designed to be a stage shop, more than anything.

This became an organ shop when the company arrived to build the pipe organ, and has lived as such for 94 years.

So it's really good for us in a building that's very active.

They've given us a large amount of space, and it's stayed ours for so long, because some of the pipes are so big, you need this much space to work with them.

But again, inside the pipe organ, what's happening, the organist is sending a signal to an electromagnet.

When that magnet opens, the pressure inside the wind chest is higher than that outside, and that causes a pouch to collapse.

That's moved through a channel on the bottom board of the chest to a matching pouch on the opposite side.

That tips, and the pipe plays.

So you can see the movement in here.

The reason it's so much movement is so that the organ can be rapidly responding to the organist's touch.

So that's the simplest way we have movement in here.

This again is just for one pipe.

Some of the chests have five, six, seven points of movement.

So it's not just re-leathering the organ, which is where you get the failure after a certain number of years, but it's mechanically making sure all these points are adjusted, and there's at least ten different points of adjustment inside the chest to make everything speak properly, not to mention the pipe itself.

So the reason for the organ here, that is a standard piece of theatrical equipment when this building was built.

So you can actually see in the blueprints, they knew they were building for an organ at that point, not that it would be featured in any way, but a state senator, Atlantic City native Senator Emerson Lewis Richards, really convinced the city, "Do you want an orchestra of 150 people to be on call for every event, because that would fill the space with sound, or would you rather have this pretty big expense of paying for the instrument once and paying a guy to play it and a guy to repair it?"

And that sort of won out.

He achieved nothing less than the world's largest musical instrument at that point, and again, the tasks the organ had ahead of it, filling 14.6 million cubic feet of air with sound, overcoming the sound absorption of 41,000 bodies, and providing accompaniment for potentially 41,000 voices if you played the national anthem, and the instrument was built to the size and scale that it could accomplish all of that.

So they began construction in August of 1929, and concluded in December of 1932, but as you're thinking about American history, they had two months of heyday before Black Tuesday and the start of the Great Depression.

Reality of the Great Depression is it really caused this instrument to be built, because to re-nig on the contract, it would have been more expensive to the city to re-nig than simply build the instrument.

So part of what we're discovering is towards the end of the construction, they did go $150,000 over budget in 1929 dollars, which is probably close to the tune of $1.2 million today, and the issue with that is they finally were issued the ultimatum, "It's time to just stop this, we can't give any more money," and that's where things started getting left on the floor.

Pipes that didn't align with their magnets that they could not have played.

One good example, and we show this on our tours we give, is the 50-inch Pazown is slated in the contract for 85 notes.

It's wired in the relay for 85 notes, but only 44 pipes were made, so we're not adding pipes to it because we want to, but because that work was never completed, and one of the most important facets in organ building is what we refer to as tonal finishing, and that's where an artisan comes through and makes minute adjustments to every single pipe.

A pipe organ, that could take anywhere from three weeks to two months, depending on the size of the instrument, and here it would have taken probably an additional year.

That never happened, and that's what plays in with the instrument's history as a white elephant.

It was big, it was loud, it was obnoxious, it was powerful, that was its claim to fame for many years because it didn't have the love it needed, and now that the staff has been working here for so long, the classical music world is looking at this going, "Where has this been hiding for nearly a century?"

And it's true that once the instrument's restored, it is one of the most remarkably appointed instruments and really gives an incredible feel for this building as well.

On our last day of filming at the Hall, we were joined by musician and composer Ryan Gregg.

Ryan had heard about the restoration work being done on the pipe organ and wanted to see and hear it for himself.

Ryan is incredibly accomplished on the keys, playing with a number of different artists and on a number of different projects, including leading his own band, the Shady Street Show Band.

He's also the lead vocalist and piano player for the Ocean Avenue Stompers, a New Orleans-inspired brass band from another boardwalk town, Asbury Park.

So of course, a player like Ryan deserves an audience in the presence of this magnificent instrument.

It's a nice room.

And perhaps he also deserves a chance to play it as well.

It's a really magnificent thing you've got here.

It's pretty incredible.

It's the largest organ console in the world.

But don't be intimidated.

I tell people, if you can play a little two-manual church organ or even a keyboard, you can play this thing.

Yeah.

And what year was this made?

The organ as a whole, which of course is 150 tons, literally all over the building, was built from 1929 to 1932.

This console that you're seeing was actually built later in the process.

There were several previous consoles that were smaller.

Actually when they first started playing the organ as early as 1929, they just had a very small three-manual console that would have looked like just about any other organ console in the world.

As they brought more things online, they upgraded to a five-manual console and actually went through three different versions of that five-manual console before they ultimately built the seven-manual console that you see today.

And what year was that?

This would have been towards the end, around 1931, 1932.

Okay.

It's gorgeous.

Basically, what you are seeing here is largely unchanged from 1932.

Very cool.

And I was hearing that the pipes are all, that's one set of pipes behind those grates up there.

Correct.

The pipes are literally spread all around the room.

What most people think of as the organ, they identify as the organ console.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But the organ itself is actually the 33,000 pipes literally spread all around the building.

What we're seeing here is just the control center.

The organ console itself doesn't actually make any noise.

It's only controlling the organ that is literally all over the building.

There are eight chambers.

The two main chambers, left and right sides of the stage, have about 55% of the pipe work.

But then there are six smaller chambers at the front and then about halfway down the hall.

The designers of the organ really wanted this to be the original surround sound.

And each of the sets of buttons across all the different manuals, are they specific to the manuals, the rows they're going for?

Yes, there are.

So you've got seven keyboards and you have control over their sound.

You can set up different sounds on each of the seven keyboards.

I tell people that organists have to be both keyboardists and conductors.

Yeah, I'm a Hammond player.

So then you understand not only are they playing with both hands and both feet, they're having to tell all of the different voices on the organ when to play.

Right now we have 288 of our 449 voices working.

So that's like having a 288 voice symphony orchestra.

But unlike an orchestra where your cellos and your violas, the sheet music would tell them when to play, the organist is having to tell the instruments when to play by turning on each of these stop tabs.

There are 1,235 of them.

So having to turn on each of these 1,235 stop tabs to tell the voices, all of the voices of the organ when to play.

So we'll turn it on here in a minute and what I'll do is get you set up.

The buttons you see on the side, the left side, 1 through 36, we kind of have those set up from softest to loudest.

And then you can modify as much as you want.

It's literally almost an unending amount of combinations of sound.

We actually had a mathematician come in here and do it.

And it's like 1 to the 68th place.

I mean it's just an incredible number of combinations.

And that's the beauty of it.

We've had so many organists come through here.

And I've been here for a little over nine years now.

And we'll still have organists come in that create sounds that I've never heard before.

And we'll be texting back and forth in our group chat.

How are they doing that?

What are they doing?

You know, it's so fun to hear people because everybody has different concepts and different ideas.

Is it intimidating?

It's exciting.

I like that answer.

Yeah, I mean it's interesting, it's historical, it's like you're playing history with this thing.

You know, you wouldn't see this built today.

You know, just the technology.

You could build it today, but you just wouldn't see it built today.

So the fact that it's still here standing in such gorgeous condition is special.

It's really special.

And I'm honored to get to touch it and play it.

You know, because a lot of times you see something like this behind ten plates of glass.

And you're coming in as a tourist and like your rose back.

And that's really nice, but it's a rare thing to be able to actually touch it and feel the history and sit in here.

Yeah, it's impressive.

[Music] Was it harder to play than you thought it would be?

What was your expectation?

What was your discovery?

I knew what I was walking into.

It's powerful.

It feels like you're playing history.

You know, when you sit behind something that's been around for this long, has been played by so many players across every genre, across people from around the world who have sat down on this thing and given their life to it.

It's an honor to sit here.

You know, the chance to play a living, breathing, acoustic instrument, even though there is, you know, we can make it smarter, we can make it, you know, with the tech now, it's still, you know, a piece of wood connected to a bunch of pipes.

You know, it's all mechanical.

And when you're playing a mechanical instrument, there's a connection there that isn't really there when you're playing a computer.

There's a lot here mechanically that has to happen to go from this note to that pipe.

You know, the room has to be right, the pipe has to be in tune, the key has to be attached.

And like, it's all, most of it's just completely mechanical.

So in that way, it's really interesting.

Any other requests?

Yeah, we can't leave without hearing a little bit of Atlantic City.

[Music] Sometimes I have to pinch myself.

It's easy, and I have to recognize that sometimes too.

It's easy to just kind of get used to the fact that I work here and I hear the organ every day.

And sometimes I just have to make myself sit down and listen and enjoy.

And sometimes it's the most unexpected moments when there's not a concert going on, but somebody just happens to be practicing and I'm the only one in the building and I'm walking through and I just get to sit down and set everything else aside and just listen.

And those unexpected times are sometimes the most fulfilling for me.

[Music] The instrument itself really is its own best voice for its restoration and preservation because as you bring it to life, it's sort of like the pipe organ industry.

You fall into this and it sucks you in in the best way possible.

You want to see these instruments come back to life because it's a piece of history and it's also acknowledging the work of people in the past.

And that's not to say that the work that's being done on pipe organs is antiquated.

There are still 24 firms in this country building new instruments.

And a lot of them come through here and are just completely flabbergasted by the fact that this was built and remark at how it was built and the time period.

It's something that will inspire people for generations to come.

[Music] [Music] ♪ Oh we are, ♪ ♪ Exactly what you see ♪ (person yelling indistinctly) ♪ Bruised and scraped ... ♪