COLUMN ONE : Aging West Betting on Gambling : Some former mining towns see low-stakes gaming as a last stab at economic salvation. But they may trade a quiet lifestyle for one of garishness and crime.

Nationally, the real estate market is as sour as a grumpy old prospector’s disposition. But don’t tell John Ficke. Land he couldn’t give away not long ago suddenly seems like the mother lode.

Take the gully full of used tires back of his realty office. Please. It went for a price in the low six figures. The shell of the fire-ravaged Gilpin Hotel has been commanding bids lately of at least $750,000. And the ghostly, abandoned Belvidere Theater, snapped up only months ago for around $117,000, is reportedly on the block again for nearly $4 million.

“I’ve sold a lot of raw land lately, old mining claims, the ditch behind me, old things that a year ago we couldn’t have sold at all,” admits Ficke, who moved to this faded 19th-Century Gold Rush boom town to escape the hassles of Denver 35 miles to the east. “ . . . Now the rat race has found me.”

Actually, what’s found Ficke and a few thousand of his friends and neighbors is the two-edged sword of a legalized gambling craze spreading across the tamed and withering heart of the old Wild West.

Fed up with business after business going bust and dwindling populations, at least 14 historic but distressed Colorado communities are eyeing low-stakes gambling as their last stab at economic salvation. So far, only Central City and two other towns in the state have gotten the go-ahead from voters. And property values in that trio of towns are already soaring even though it’s still a good nine months before anyone cranks a one-armed bandit or shuffles a blackjack deck.

But critics warn that the cure could be worse than the disease, turning poor but quaint towns into rowdy, garish ones stripped of the very charm and flavor they hope an injection of cash can help preserve.

“This is paradise lost,” predicted Rob Sawyer, who was attracted to Central City because it was so quiet and uncomplicated. “ . . . The rapid growth that is expected is exactly the opposite of what I moved up here for.”

So far, the central laboratory for the new wave gaming experiment is Deadwood, S.D., a remote Black Hills mining town proud of a bawdy, bloody heritage. Best known as the place where Wild Bill Hickok stopped a bullet and died back in 1876, Deadwood reveled in its reputation as a prime sporting spot. But, starting after World War II, the gambling halls and brothels were gradually shut in a wave of moral piety that didn’t end until 1981 when authorities closed Pam Holiday’s aptly named “Purple Door” for the last time.

It was downhill from there. Then, hemorrhaging both financially and spiritually as the population slowly dwindled, the casinos reopened in 1989 with an official blessing and a $5 cap on bets. The limit was designed to deter the development of massive Las Vegas-style casinos and criminal problems that have been associated with them.

In the first 12 months since legalization, some 80 betting parlors sprang up and gamblers dropped a whopping $281 million in action. Deadwood is now flush with funds to refurbish historic buildings and make long deferred repairs on water and sewer lines, tourists have been arriving in droves and business is booming.

On the down side, parking has become a nightmare, criminal and traffic arrests have nearly doubled and skyrocketing property values and rents have driven many longtime residents as well as the lion’s share of non-gambling establishments out of town.

As speculators snapped up storefronts like candy, virtually all of Deadwood’s retailing fixtures vanished. The A&W; drive-in and the Gold Crown bowling alley were torn down to make way for a new gambling resort. Goldberg’s Grocery, one of two supermarkets and the only one that delivered, kept its name but replaced the food shelves with slot machines. The drug store is gone and all three car dealers lost their leases and left.

Anthony’s, a clothing shop on Main Street, is now the Gold Dust Gaming Hall. The New York Store, another longtime clothier, was bought for a reported $1 million and is presently being turned into a gambling venture owned in part by actor Kevin Costner.

In fact, the 114-year-old Ayres Hardware is the only non-gambling business left on Main Street. Agnes Ayres, the 73-year-old proprietor, finally hung a sign in the window to stop the parade of people trying to buy her out. “Do not ask,” it reads. “Building is not for sale. Don’t even think about it.”

“I voted for it but I didn’t think it would take everything else away,” confessed Ayres. “The basic concept was OK . . . but it’s destroyed the close-knit fabric of the town.”

Indeed, a poll conducted by University of South Dakota researchers last fall suggested that a large number of people in the Deadwood area supported gambling but had misgivings. About two-thirds of the Deadwood residents surveyed said gambling should continue, but nearly eight out of ten said they didn’t like it, and 87% said they didn’t want to live there, though gambling wasn’t the sole reason for their displeasure.

Still, longtime residents who had watched in sadness as businesses boarded up and the population dwindled to around 1,800, largely agreed that Deadwood needed some kind of shock therapy to survive.

“I think it was a great idea for Deadwood because it was just shrinking like an ice cube that melts away,” said Denis Caron, who closed the Coast-to-Coast hardware store he ran for 33 years a few weeks after gambling began. He won’t say how much he made on the sale of the building but estimated that gambling fever probably quintupled its value.

Jim Shad, who added slot machines to supplement his local jewelry business, said the positives to gaming outweigh the problems. “Older people have lost their shopping, which is bad for them, but it’s change that had to come about,” said Shad. “ . . . There are a lot of new faces, but we’re going to get to know them.”

Even Police Chief Les Bradley had good things to say about gambling, though it has forced him to double the size of what had been a six-person staff. “There’s always more crime when you have more people,” he explained. “There’s a parking problem, more dogs barking, more family disturbances. But we’ve always had it here. . . . It’s still a small town. It’s just busier. The people we deal with are pretty decent.”

Faced with a near-identical set of problems to Deadwood, city fathers in Central City and neighboring Black Hawk recently won approval on a statewide ballot initiative to allow them to inaugurate low-stakes gambling next October. The measure also applied to Cripple Creek, another historic but economically rocky old mining town west of Colorado Springs.

Not a single bet has been placed in any of the three towns, yet grass-roots groups in 11 other Colorado communities have already announced plans to seek permission for legalized gambling on the 1992 ballot. Meanwhile, leaders of the Southern Ute Tribe say they may take advantage of a loophole in federal law and open a casino on their remote and impoverished reservation in Southwestern Colorado.

From a distance, Central City looks almost postcard perfect. The road into town winds through the Rocky Mountains up narrow Clear Creek Canyon where Colorado gold miners first struck it rich in 1859. The downtown sits in a narrow ravine, surrounded by century-old “boom Victorian” mansions perched sturdily on the bedrock hillsides above.

Once home to 100,000 people, the valley that contains Central City and Black Hawk now boasts a combined population of about 650. At close inspection, many of the stately buildings--including those commanding top-dollar prices as the start of gambling approaches--are pocked with gaping holes and empty. Some are fire ravaged and gutted.

Summer tourist traffic has waned, sales tax revenues have nose-dived and shop after shop has closed in recent years. But residents say all that should change, and rapidly. “We’re going to survive now,” crowed 61-year-old Ed Graff, the host at the Gilded Garter Saloon. “The town was in its demise. Look outside today and there’s no one here, but come back next year at this time and there’ll be people up and down the street.”

Developers and land speculators are already sizing up their opportunities. One day recently, a group of five impeccably groomed businessmen--a striking contrast to the bearded and flannel-shirt locals--were holding an impromptu meeting out on Main Street. One was a local businessman who plans to open his own gambling hall, while the others identified themselves as an out-of-town investor, an architect, a casino consultant and a sales representative for a firm that markets slot machines and other gambling equipment.

Because of Central City’s proximity to Denver, Mayor Bruce Schmaltz predicts casinos here will do $1-billion worth of business in their first year. “This place will be packed,” he said. “It will be wall-to-wall people here.”

That’s just what scares gambling opponents like Rob Sawyer. “Sure we needed a little influx but not this,” he said. “Basically, the whole power structure should change. Who knows who’s fronting for who. People who live here will receive offers they can’t refuse and they will leave and the whole community will change, going from a small-town mentality to a big-money mentality.”

Despite his reservations, Sawyer says he plans to stay in town. “I can be bought if someone offers me a ridiculous price for my house,” he admitted. “But if they offer me a price like that, I wouldn’t want to stay here anyway.”

Times researchers Ann Rovin in Central City and Tracy Shryer in Deadwood contributed to this story.