The way the date function works is that if there's no parameter passed to it, it defaults to now, and you're not passing it any parameters.
In order to get the date out of the date field, try
<?php date_added = date("l M d, Y @ g:i A", $_recordset1['date_added']);
echo ($date_added); ?>
I've been having all sorts of trouble with timestamp to date with this function, today I found a MySQL function to pull the data (date) out of the database just as you want it, skipping having PHP reword it, so in my select statement I have
DATE_FORMAT(eventdates.`date`, '%m-%d-%Y') alias
date is a reserved word in SQL, so use the ` to escape it, alias is just a way to give that record a name that the GUI can handle