Detroit Takes a Gamble on Casinos
Linda Boyce swapped a sick day from the assembly line for six hours of standing in a party line, one of hundreds of people dripping and squirming and dancing on the baked pavement, just dying for a duel to the debt with an invading army of one-armed bandits.
Then the gates were unlocked, the doors to the fortress were flung open, and a black woman who may have built the transmission in your Ford Motor Co. vehicle rode a steep escalator to an urban Oz, sharing grins and gawks with the bearded bikers and working-class white boys, with the rich and the poor, the swanky and the skanky, emissaries from every splintered part of this region.
There were retirees fresh from Florida sharing tables with hip-hop hard guys, Italian suits rubbing elbows with untucked Detroit Tiger T-shirts. There were folks who had fled so far from the soul of this badly hurt city that they couldn’t remember the last time they’d even been back.
The $220-million MGM Grand opened the doors Thursday to the first casino in the heart of a major American city, and the moment felt like a jolt of electricity to a cardiac case, a pulse that kept beating as opening day blurred into opening weekend. More casinos are coming, bigger and slicker, a grand gamble and major municipal experiment in a town that some mistakenly think is too risky to visit, let alone wager on.
The casino business--along with the construction of a new downtown ballpark for the Detroit Tigers and a football stadium for the Lions--are the latest attempts to reverse three decades of urban decay in one of America’s great cities, a town built on an automotive industry that powered a global economy for much of the century. Even though General Motors Corp. is re-staking its claim to the city’s future by building a giant new headquarters here, Detroit has suddenly become the great laboratory test for the gaming industry and its critics.
“In five years, 10 years, Detroit will be the talk of the world,” said Dana Napier, the casino’s vice president for table games. “With our brand name, people are going to follow.”
Indeed, the 75,000-square-foot casino is only the first of three casinos approved by voters, who were seeing their town used as a mere crossroads to the booming gaming industry in Windsor, Canada, across the Detroit River. Windsor--the only place in Canada that is actually south of the United States border--has become a boom town by tapping the Detroit market. And 17 Indian casinos have cropped up elsewhere in the state.
Detroiters, who’d voted the idea down four times in the past three decades, decided to take a chance even though critics worried the casinos would be magnets for crime. And now the concept of casinos in other major urban areas has gained a foothold, and investors are banking billions of dollars that it succeeds here.
The casino is to be replaced by a more permanent and somewhat more elegant structure in the next few years. Right now, it’s inside a slab-like former IRS building that looks like a high-security prison from the outside and a somewhat sensory-overloading sampler of Las Vegas on the inside, a strange combination of garish glitz and heavy-handed security. The ubiquitous food court also had a “local favorites” stop that included pork chops, collard greens and black-eyed peas.
There were so many hulksters in so many uniforms with so many ways of communicating with each other that, if anything, it helped feed the perception that downtown Detroit is a more dangerous place than it actually is.
Some employees said they were grilled aggressively if they were found outside their particular areas inside the casino, and one restaurant worker said she had to get an official escort back to the casino’s eatery after a trip to the bathroom.
Yet a smattering of panhandlers on the awesomely policed periphery of the city’s otherwise blighted west side, and the hookers and junkies drifting around not far away along the dead corridor called Woodward Avenue were signs of the dark side of wagering a community’s recovery on one of its worst vices.
Some people fear prostitutes and criminals will be as attracted to the glitter as the honest patrons. And some question whether a hardscrabble place needs a business bent on taking their limited resources.
Linda Boyce, for example, came and cornered her quarry, a platoon of $1 slot machines, and began firing popcorn tubs full of silver-dollar tokens until, 45 minutes after she had blown through the door, her $600 investment in getting rich was gone. She pondered her losses and did what Detroit has kept doing: tried again. She called her sister and had her bring another $200.
“That went pretty quick too,” Boyce, 45, said cheerfully as her first day in the casino blended into her second. “But I’ll be back.”
There were at least 5,000 patrons present at any given time in the two-floor casino. But what was particularly striking about “the cast,” as MGM calls its 2,200 employees, was how willingly they gave up their old jobs to grab new ones in an atmosphere many metropolitan Midwesterners felt was too exciting to pass up. The security staff included a former Detroit police sergeant and dealing blackjack was a moonlighting employee of the city’s waste-water treatment plant.
Some women were turned off by the outfits worn by the cocktail waitresses, a superstructure-enhancing, thong-meets-Wonderbra outfit that looked like it belonged on a Brazilian beach.
Avis rental car counter clerk Marcie McCauley, who lives in suburban Southgate, said she was all for a casino in Detroit and, like plenty of other people, said she would be more willing to spend her dollars locally than at the popular casinos across the river. But those cocktail waitress outfits, she said, are a little too lurid for her taste.
“I think they’re cute,” countered fellow counter clerk Rebecca Richardson, 21, who said that a few women from Avis got jobs at the casino and she was pondering the move herself. “It’s just exciting,” said cocktail waitress Tina Dormei, a 32-year-old former mortgage officer moving with a tray and a sway.
Not everybody believes that casinos and convention centers and ballparks are ways to build a foundation that results in good jobs, roads and schools, something Detroit seriously lacks.
“That’s all leaders seem to care about: new stadiums and casinos and things like that. We need to fix our schools,” said Joyce Moore, a parking valet clerk at the skyline-defining Renaissance Center, a generation-old project that also was pitched as just the thing needed to spark a resurgence.
Ernest Roquemore leaned on a police barricade and mulled whether to join a line that, by 5 a.m. had dwindled down to roughly a 45-minute wait. Roquemore has seen the historic arc of the Motor City, from the day he got out of his segregated unit in the Navy and left Texarkana, Texas, about 52 years ago to find work at the Chrysler Corp.
The day before this casino opened was the 32nd anniversary of the day his 19-year-old son and namesake was shot in the back by a cop during the Detroit riots of 1967, when the civil rights movement erupted into civil insurrection and often murderous retaliation by the authorities.
Gambling on gambling is indeed a desperate measure. But these are desperate times, he says. “Sixty-seven, that’s when the city started going down,” said Roquemore, a sad-eyed man of 75, as he placidly watched the buzz of multiracial life still humming around the casino just before sunrise Friday. “That’s when the [white] people started to move out to the suburbs, when the businesses started to move out.”
Detroit has lost a third of its population since 1970 and has a crumbling infrastructure, a jobless rate twice that of its suburbs and nearly 45,000 abandoned or condemned homes.
Roquemore’s wife died three years ago and his other three surviving kids have their own lives now, so he could kill a couple of hours just watching the place pulsing with life.
“It’s time for a change,” he said. “I think this thing is going to work.”
