Long before he opened a casino in the old steel city of Gary, millionaire developer Donald Trump declared that “casino gambling is a very bad idea, not only for Gary but also for the Chicago area.”
“Gambling,” he warned, “has not been the savior of Atlantic City.”
A few years later, on the day he started building his casino facilities in Gary, Trump boasted, “I can’t believe how perfect this is. . . . “
This month marks two years since gambling’s glitz squeezed in between a Gary cement factory and the sprawling steel mills nearby. And today, it seems that both Donald Trumps are partly right.
True, gambling hasn’t been the savior of Gary. But, though it’s not exactly perfect, Gary Mayor Scott King is pleased that it exists. After all, it’s rough being the mayor of Gary–the not-so-proud winner of America’s “most dangerous city” title, where downtown is almost a ghost town, right in the heart of a region that lost some 70,000 jobs during the early and mid-1980s.
Trauma has hit Gary so hard, said King’s press secretary, Sandi Cogan, that “we’re waiting for a plague of frogs.”
In the midst of the plagues and perils sits a set of sparkling casinos, brightening the industrial waterfront with lights blinking, bells ringing and–best of all–dollar bills flashing. But whether the casino boats on Lake Michigan are rescuing Gary from the edge of disaster is hotly debated, even as millions of visitors pass through the turnstiles and spend millions–even billions–of dollars.
“The region lost 70,000 jobs. . . . That was the kind of economic devastation there,” said Patrick Traub, spokesman for the Indiana Gaming Association, which represents the casino boats.
“Here was a business willing to risk capital in an economically depressed area and create X number of jobs,” said Traub. “It has created 11,000 jobs statewide. It has invested $1.2 billion. . . . Last year, the eight (Indiana) operating boats generated $270 million just in gaming taxes.”
The gambling business, he said indignantly, “doesn’t get the respect it deserves.”
A healthy dose of disrespect comes from John Kindt, a University of Illinois professor of commerce and legal policy. “The Gary casinos,” Kindt said, “are cannibalizing the regional economy.”
Downtown Gary remains desolate, he said, and “that’s what we said would happen. . . . Atlantic City is a classic example. It used to be a slum by the sea. Now it’s an even worse slum, with casinos, by the sea.”
Everybody does agree on one thing, though: It was steel that built Gary–and no matter how the cards are dealt, the casinos are hard pressed to compete with that economic might.
“U.S. Steel created Gary and the chairman of the board said, `It shall have my name,’ ” said Traub, referring to Judge Elbert Gary, who headed the mammoth steel corporation when Gary was founded in 1906.
Ever since, Gary “has had the psyche of a mill town,” said King. “No matter what else, you could always get a job in the mill.”
Pointing from City Hall to the massive smokestacks of U.S. Steel Gary Works, the mayor said, “Until the late ’60s, 25,000 people worked right across the toll road at that steel mill and the overwhelming majority lived in Gary, shopped in Gary, paid their taxes in Gary. Now 7,500 people work there and out of that number, 2,500–one-tenth from 30 years ago–live in the city.”
Times have changed and today, would-be steelworkers are dealing cards.
Darrell Jones was once a laborer at U.S. Steel; now he deals blackjack at Trump Casino.
“The mill was a dirty, grungy job and there was a lot of hard labor involved . . . extreme heat, dirt, dust, very noisy,” said Jones. “We used to ship to Frigidaire for refrigerator parts and we shipped to GM and Ford for car parts.
“Now the hardest part of my job is pushing cards,” he said, “and I push them one at a time.”
It may be easier–and a lot cleaner–but the jobs just can’t compete. Indiana State Rep. Earl Harris, who represents Gary, said that with overtime and profit sharing an average union steelworker in the area makes about $40,000 a year, while casino workers make “roughly half” that.
Casino proponents bristle at such comparisons. “Nobody’s going to argue that,” said Traub, “but the steel industry is gone. It created Gary and it left Gary.
“When you were 10 years old, you thought you’d spend your life in the steel mills. Now you’re 25 . . . Now you’ve got nothing, and then the casinos come along. All we’ve promised are jobs. We didn’t promise to remake America.”
Gary’s two casino boats–the Majestic Star and Trump Casino–now employ about 2,200 people, more than 70 percent of whom live in Lake County, Ind., where Gary is located, according to the Indiana Gaming Commission. Indiana has licensed eight boats in all, three of them near Gary in East Chicago, Hammond and Michigan City. The other three are south on the Ohio River.
The two Gary boats themselves had some 3.5 million visitors last year who played $2.4 billion on slot machines and video poker alone, the commission said.
That meant a hefty sum for Gary. Mayor King said his city’s budget historically includes some $70 million in taxes and other revenues. The casinos, he said, “have pumped in an additional $25 million,” which is being used for street repairs, equipment purchases and other improvements.
The casinos have also put Gary back on the map for thousands of people who previously never set foot in the gritty industrial town. Slot player Mike Sivek, a printer who came from Oak Lawn, Ill., to the Majestic Star, said that before the casinos opened, Gary was merely “a drive-through on the way to Michigan.” And a smoke-filled, foul-smelling drive at that.
But while they lure visitors, the boats are totally isolated from the rest of the city, avoiding even the name “Gary” by calling themselves the “Buffington Harbor” casinos. “I don’t even know how to get through Gary,” confessed Daniel Cresong, a retired maintenance man who visited from the Chicago suburb of Homewood.
“We come straight here on the tollway and go back home the same way,” said his wife, Helen. “You don’t have to go on the streets–I wouldn’t anyway. Not at night, at least.”
It seems that no matter how much the casinos sparkle and shine, they can’t quite brighten Gary’s image. The bad publicity just doesn’t stop.
Last year, press secretary Cogan was handling public relations for a city voted “the worst place to live, the worst place to raise children, the most dangerous place to live,” she lamented. “I’ve seen a man (Mayor King) inherit a behemoth and try to tame it.”
The first devastating report hit last summer, when the Children’s Environmental Index ranked Gary dead last in the quality of life it offered children–219th out of 219 American cities. Compiled by the non-profit group Zero Population Growth, the study concluded that 42.9 percent of Gary’s children lived in poverty. Along with poverty, the index considered other factors such as crime, pollution and unemployment rates.
Just a few months later, another survey–this one by Money magazine–deemed Gary the nation’s “most dangerous city.” Money determined that Gary’s homicide rate was 89.6 killings per 100,000 people, way above the national rate of 7.4 per 100,000.
All that, as the casinos glitter in the background. That’s the stuff that anti-gambling arguments are made of.
“There are always promises of revitalization and all that money coming in. As you can see in Gary, it isn’t there–it hasn’t evolved,” said Rev. Steven Conner, a Methodist minister and the chairman of Michiana Against Casinos, a coalition of Indiana and Michigan organizations.
“That speaks for itself.”
Gambling opponents aren’t hard to find, whether their arguments are economic or moral–or based on what Indiana University economist Morton Marcus calls “economic morality.”
Legal gambling, Marcus said, “is sending a message to young people, to workers, to everyone, that rewards in life are based on chance.” That undercuts the more positive message–essential to Gary’s success–that “it’s worth staying in school, worth going through retraining efforts,” he said.
His argument may not sway those at the Gary campus of Ivy Tech State College. There, along with courses like Pipe Welding 1 and Fluid Power Basics, students work diligently at what may be some of the nation’s most unusual college courses. Technology of Gaming–Blackjack is one; Slots Management is another.
Ivy Tech’s Room 210 is ready–not with chalk and blackboards, but with blackjack, craps, roulette and poker tables.
“This is totally unique,” said Bob Forster, manager of the college’s casino training program. “Originally, the community was a little bit concerned with the college being involved in gambling–we’re not. We’re involved in educating and training people so they can go out and get jobs.
“We’ve trained over 3,000 people.”
Forster cited statistics from the American Gaming Association, a national trade group, that say 9.5 percent of Indiana’s casino workers left the welfare rolls for their jobs and 16 percent stopped unemployment benefits. The statistics further indicate that the boats’ employees purchased 1,900 homes, 4,500 cars and 6,000 major appliances, and ate 27,000 meals in local restaurants.
Mayor King said that when the boats opened in June 1996, the devastation of Gary fell into the background as he watched “young people from this community beaming with pride because they had a job.”
King conceded that the boats alone can’t save his city, and he can only hope that Chicago doesn’t soon grab the market with legal casinos of its own. For now, he said, “we’re kind of making hay while the sun shines.”
Yet some say the bonuses aren’t worth the havoc that casinos wreak. The Indiana Council on Problem Gambling, for example, contends that legalized gambling–in Gary and elsewhere–is creating a new class of compulsive gamblers.
“They’ve discovered video poker or the one-armed bandits. . . . They finally discovered the one game that really hooked them, that really excited them, that got their juices flowing,” said council director Ron Phillips.
Phillips said that 2 or 3 percent of the U.S. population already is hooked and “that will be up to 5, 6, even 7 percent in the next few years. . . . We’ll see bankruptcies, people turning to criminal activity to pay for their gambling, embezzling, taking their families down the tubes. You’ll see increasing numbers of suicides.”
Such concerns already have reached the ear of Indiana Gov. Frank O’Bannon, who recently appointed Indiana Atty. Gen. Jeff Modisett to chair the new Gambling Impact Study Committee.
Modisett said the governor was responding to voters who asked him to “take a few steps backward” and look closely before legalized gambling is expanded. So far, the new committee has requested briefings on the impact gambling has on such things as tax revenue, gambling addiction and jobs.
While most agree that casinos have brought desperately needed jobs to Gary, some contend that the net economic effect is negative nevertheless. “For every dollar spent in a casino, that’s a dollar not spent on washers or dryers or cars,” said professor Kindt. The casinos may boom, he said, as other area businesses die.
Opponents point to casino owners such as Trump, who so quickly changed his tune once he himself was a certain investor in Gary.
“I wouldn’t trust them,” said Rev. Conner.
“They all know that casinos are bad economics,” said Kindt, “unless they’re the owners.”
There’s certainly no debating that Broadway–downtown Gary’s once-bustling main corridor–is still depressingly dismal, with block after block of shuttered stores protected from lonely streets by metal security grates.
At one time, “you had eateries, theaters, stores . . . It was hustle-bustle,” said Christine Lacy, a Buffington Harbor employee who worked 30 years in the mills until her layoff last year. Back then “there was no place to park,” she said. Now “there’s no place to shop.”
At the start of Broadway, just behind City Hall, sits the abandoned Sheraton Hotel, its windows cracked, its balcony railings rusted.
If Gary is to be brought back from the dead, it will be a daunting task, with or without gambling dollars. Still, local officials vow that it can be done. The casinos, they say, are the first step.
In the early 1980s, Earline Rogers was a member of Gary’s City Council, struggling to attract something–anything–to replace the lost mill jobs. That didn’t happen. Later, she joined the Indiana Senate and fought for casinos for her fading hometown.
“When you think we couldn’t get a business to invest even a few thousand dollars and then you’ve got a casino willing to invest millions, you have to stop and take a look,” said Rogers.
“Those of us who had the dream . . . thought that once we got the casinos, they may have a domino effect,” she said. “That hasn’t happened yet, but it’s early.”
So far, officials admit that the boats float “like a little island.” But they envision developing the surrounding lakefront with shops, a golf course, a steel museum or an amusement park. Trump is already building a hotel.
As cynics scoff, the dreamers keep dreaming. Jack Thar, the gaming commission’s executive director, falls somewhere in between.
“What the casinos represented they would do, they have done,” Thar said. “But casino gambling doesn’t answer all of Gary’s prayers. . . . These people begged for investment for years and nobody came. Tell the economists (who criticize casinos) to find a business who will come in and take their place. Would you rather see a company that makes cars or bricks? Sure. But they didn’t come.”
LEARNING TO DEAL LIKE A PRO
“Ready to have a little luck today?”
That was the way Joseph DeRosa, vice president of Gary’s Trump Casino, greeted a class during a recent “field trip” to the casino boat.
Student Ronnie Waddell II was ready with a quick response. “Are we all going to get hired?” asked Waddell. “You said `luck.’ “
These days, to these students, luck is landing steady work. Waddell’s mother was one of thousands of workers in Gary who were laid off from solid steel mill jobs. So Waddell is determined to make it in the town’s blossoming new business–the Majestic Star and Trump Casino boats.
Taking the first step, Waddell enrolled in a novel college course called Technology of Gaming–Blackjack. It’s a sign of the times that Ivy Tech State College now teaches blackjack dealing, on the same Gary campus that offers auto body repair and drafting.
As DeRosa led the students aboard the floating casino, teacher Vickie Sacco advised them to observe the master card dealers that they hoped to become. “Look for those little signs of professionalism I’ve tried to teach you,” she said.
Most days, Sacco instructs students in Room 210 of Ivy Tech, a classroom cluttered with blackjack, craps, roulette and poker tables. The Indiana Gaming Commission requires her students to have 130 hours of training to become blackjack dealers; craps requires 200 hours. The college even offers a two-year degree in casino management.
Sacco, who is DeRosa’s wife, teaches not only the rules of the game and the details of betting. Handling chips worth thousands of dollars is big business, and students are drilled on the precise hand movements that mark a professional dealer. One day, if they make it, every move they make will be scrutinized by casino ceiling cameras.
They also learn the language of cards.
“Color coming in!” Sacco called as she taught students the intricacies of exchanging chips. “Bring it on over!”
While one end of Room 210 was busy with blackjack, the other housed students struggling to memorize the seemingly endless variety of bets made in craps, a complex dice game that boasts a baffling lingo all its own.
“Five–no field five! Don’t’s and comes travel to the five!” student Sherene Rooks called. “Five dollar horn high, 12 straight out.”
The craps students were back at school, having earlier mastered simpler games like blackjack. They all had casino jobs already, but wanted to advance their skills.
“My father was a chemist at Inland (Steel) for 44 years,” said craps student Elizabeth Martin, 38. After she left high school, “he was going to get me into the mill,” she said. “I never got in–that’s when the big layoffs started.” Martin turned to waitressing and once the casinos opened, she learned the art of dealing cards.
Dealing has its own demands and wages that are, admittedly, nothing like those earned by a union steelworker. “You start out at less than minimum wage. We depend on `tokes,’ ” said Martin, using a casino term for tips. (Sacco said the average “toke rate” at Trump comes to about $11 an hour.)
At Martin’s side was Darrell Jones, 47, who once worked in the mills and now deals blackjack. When Jones was a youth, he said, “you could get a job today in one mill and go tomorrow to another mill and be hired.”
Now he feels that casinos offer the security the mills once did. “Casinos will always be around,” said Jones. And the job, he said, is a lot more fun than the dirt and grime of steel.
“People who are winning, they’re happy . . . they’re really friendly and call you by your first name,” said Jones. “When they come back, they’ll look for you–they consider you lucky.”
When people lose, well, that’s another story.
Sacco, who has been teaching in Gary since the casinos opened there two years ago, learned the ups and downs of gambling in her own hometown, Atlantic City.
As a youth, she said, “I watched the decline of Atlantic City. . . . We were a thriving community–not in steel, but in tourism. After the ’50s, it all went downhill.”
While some economists argue that gambling made Atlantic City into a “slum with casinos,” Sacco sees it differently. “It was mind-boggling, the crowds that showed up–the excitement, the money was unbelievable,” she said. “It opened up a world of opportunity.”
Sacco hopes the same opportunities will now grace the lives of her Gary students, and Waddell hopes so, too. As their field trip to Trump ended, he shook DeRosa’s hand and vowed to return–for a job. “Mr. DeRosa, you’ll see me again,” said Waddell. “You will see me again.”
