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In the 37 years since Parker Brothers made Monopoly one of the nation's most popular indoor sports, the once sumptuous streets of Atlantic City, N.J., which gave their names to the Monopoly board, have considerably deteriorated. The famed Boardwalk offers little more than whirling dervish rides, shooting galleries and stomach-eroding refreshment stands. Two of the tackier streets in town are Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues--also the cheapest buys on the Monopoly board. Thus, as part of a $1,000,000 public works improvement program, Atlantic City's public works commissioner, Arthur W. Ponzio, proposed to change the names of the avenues to Fairmont and Melrose to improve the city's traffic patterns and to get away from the old low-rent image.

Suddenly, letters and telegrams poured in from all over the country, beseeching the town fathers to retain the storied names. The officially incorporated United States Monopoly Association, whose members conduct annual matches in white tie and tails, further insisted that Baltic and Mediterranean ought to sport "the appropriate purple street signs"; the association seriously threatened to bring the matter to the attention of the Department of the Interior's board on historic sites and monuments.

At last the city commissioners unanimously defeated the ordinance and announced that the original names would indeed be retained. That, of course, does not help the property value of the streets any, but perhaps a referendum to legalize gambling in the Garden State will make Baltic and Mediterranean worth playing for with real money.

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