The Other White House: An American Institution

In 1946, the front room of a building on Arctic Avenue was a tailor shop, where a man named Anthony Basile pressed suits and took in seams. By the end of that year it had become something else entirely — and eighty years later, “the other White House” is one of the most beloved names in New Jersey. The story of how a tailor’s storefront turned into a temple of the submarine sandwich is, in its own way, the story of Atlantic City itself.

Built in the right moment

Tony Basile opened the White House Sub Shop that year alongside his Aunt Basilia and his Uncle Alfred “Fritz” Sacco. The timing mattered. The war had just ended, the boys were coming home, and the boardwalk city was filling back up with people looking to spend a summer afternoon well. Into that moment the Basile family offered something simple and honest: a cold or hot sub, built on good bread, roughly two feet long, made the same way every time. It was not complicated. It was just done right, over and over, until doing it right became a tradition.

The bread is the thing the regulars will tell you about first — the local Italian rolls that give a White House sub its backbone. The Italian sub made the shop’s name, and the house creation they call the White House Special has kept it. But if you ask what truly separated this place from every other corner deli, the answer is consistency. For eighty years, through changing ownership of half the city around it, the sandwich has stayed the sandwich.

Sinatra and a schoolteacher, same line

Then there are the visitors, and here the list starts to read like a century of American fame. Frank Sinatra ate here. So did Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Joe DiMaggio and Rocky Marciano came through. Oprah Winfrey. A parade of Miss Americas, crowned just up the boardwalk. The most charming chapter belongs to the Beatles: after their 1964 Atlantic City concert, the four most famous young men on the planet sent out for a White House sub — a single hoagie reported at seventy-two inches, six full feet of it. Whatever else you can say about a sandwich shop, not many can claim to have fed both the Chairman of the Board and the Fab Four.

The famous and the ordinary stand in the same line and get the same roll.Henry Whitaker

But I’d caution against reducing the White House to its celebrity wall. The deeper truth is that the same sandwich handed to Sinatra was handed to the dockworker, the schoolteacher, the family down for a week at the shore. That’s the democracy of a great local institution — the famous and the ordinary stand in the same line and get the same roll. The White House never had to choose between being a landmark and being a neighborhood lunch counter. It simply remained both.

The shop has weathered the hard decades too — the long stretch when Atlantic City’s fortunes sagged, the storms, the shifting boardwalk economy. Through it, that neon sign kept buzzing on Arctic Avenue, a fixed point in a city that has reinvented itself more times than most. When people talk about the “real” Atlantic City — the one that existed before and beneath the casinos — they are talking, in part, about places like this.

Eighty years from a tailor shop. A sandwich that hasn’t lost its way. If you find yourself in Atlantic City this summer, skip the food court. Go stand in the line that Sinatra and a schoolteacher once stood in, and order something two feet long. You’ll be tasting a piece of New Jersey that refuses to go out of style.

What’s your White House order? Tell us — and which South Jersey institution we should spotlight next.

Based on reporting from the Press of Atlantic City, Shore Local Newsmagazine, Wikipedia, and White House Sub Shop. These heritage spotlights are written from public reporting and historical record.