Biloxi and Atlantic City have things in common, which is why this story is on a page with an Atlantic City story. Some of them are obvious.
They’re both on saltwater. They both have beaches, though Biloxi’s are fake. We’ll get back to that.
They’re close to neat old cities: Atlantic City is an hour’s drive from Philadelphia (yes, Philly has some neat things). Biloxi is 90 minutes from New Orleans and about the same from Mobile (yes, Mobile has some neat things).
(Related culinary note: Atlantic City sells Philadelphia hoagies, which are kind of like the New Orleans po boys sold in Biloxi. Kind of. And you can buy taffy in both places, but why?)
Before gambling spread beyond Nevada, they both were popular resort towns that had seen better days, though that sweet nostalgic description doesn’t entirely capture the essence of Biloxi’s pre-gaming reality.
“We were six months behind on bills, having difficulty making payroll and just struggling to survive,” said David Nichols, Biloxi’s chief administrative officer, who arrived in 1991 and helped ease the city through the transition that began the following year. “We were basically a bankrupt city,”
Today, the two have casinos. Lots of casinos. Glittering, clanking, bell-ringing casinos.
Yet, Biloxi isn’t Atlantic City — which is good news. Unlike the Jersey playground, which considers anything off The Boardwalk a nuisance, the Biloxi comeback is as much a general revival as reinvention.
“I don’t know that much about Atlantic City,” said Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway. “But I think we did it right.”
The casino belt on the Mississippi Gulf Coast stretches 26 miles from Bay St. Louis — a gallon of gas from the Louisiana border — through Pass Christian, Long Beach, Gulfport and on to Biloxi. In all and at this moment (things can change quickly here), there are 12 casinos, all on floating but stationary dockside platforms and most of them in Gulfport and Biloxi.
The newest and largest, the Steve Wynn-built Beau Rivage, opened March 16, and like most Wynnian properties (which include Las Vegas’ Mirage and Bellagio), it is an eye-popper. Even without an exploding volcano, sinking frigate or dancing water, the place, decorated in French-garden Impressionism (think Monet), cost $650 million and looks every bit of it, right down to the 10,000 tulips in the atrium-entryway. It has 1,780 rooms, 12 restaurants, a 1,550-seat theater for a Cirque du Soleil troupe and 72,000 square feet of casino.
“Still, it feels intimate,” insisted Sandra Zanella, the resort’s public affairs coordinator and herself a walking irony: Days before Biloxi opened its first casino (the Isle of Capri) after the 1992 referendum, Zanella was in Atlantic City as a finalist in the Miss America Pageant — as Miss Nevada. (Her talent, you ask? Ventriloquism.)
There are other big guys here besides Wynn. Last year, Hilton bought the sister Grand Casinos (and their related hotels, which are expanding) in Gulfport and Biloxi. The Isle of Capri Casino-Resort, born as a pair of Iowa-based paddleboats that were floated down here and strapped together to make one casino, is part of a Crowne Plaza resort.
The Imperial Palace, familiar to Las Vegas people as a mid-range Strip hotel there, has a presence in Biloxi (though on a recent mid-day visit, the IP had about as many security guards as players in its casino). The Hard Rock Cafe people, who have expanded their hotel-casino operation in Vegas, are said to be scouting for a Biloxi location.
So what’s the deal with Biloxi? Doesn’t anyone remember “Biloxi Blues”?
“I didn’t think it was going to be this hot,” soldier Eugene Jerome whined in Neil Simon’s mid-’80s play. “It’s like Africa hot. Tarzan couldn’t have taken this kind of hot.”
Yes, in summer it gets a tad muggy in Biloxi.
“We sort of feel the humidity weeds the people out,” said Sara Foster, a Bay St. Louis artist. “If they can’t stand the humidity, they get out — and leave the community for us.”
“What you find in the summertime,” conceded David Nichols, “is a lot of your golf is played early in the morning or late in the afternoon.”
Ah, yes, there’s golf here.
Roughly 20 courses are within an easy drive of Gulfport-Biloxi, the exact number depending on one’s definition of an easy drive. With a towel in summer and a sweater in winter, they’re playable all year. Arnold Palmer designed one — the Bridges — for Casino Magic’s operation in Bay St. Louis. The Oaks, in Pass Christian, gets raves from locals, and so do Windance and Broadwater (both Gulfport) and Diamondhead’s Cardinal course (in Diamondhead). Country star Vince Gill played the venerable (1908) Great Southern Golf Club (Gulfport) when he was in town. Pete Dye (famous designer) has a course. Tom Fazio (another one) is building a layout for the Beau Rivage. Jack Nicklaus (you know him) is designing one for the two Grand Casinos.
More good news: Greens fees, typically $100 and up in Las Vegas (way up in a couple of cases), average about $50 on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, cart included.
And speaking of sand, might as well talk about those beaches.
Except where there are casinos and boats, the coastline is pretty much all beach, none of it natural. Until this century, water’s edge here was like a riverbank; barrier islands kill the surf — except during hurricanes, which happen. In 1927, engineers built a seawall to help protect coastal property against those hurricanes, but folks wanted more. In the 1950s, engineers dredged up sand and put beach between the seawall and the sea, but even that couldn’t keep Hurricane Camille from doing $1.42 billion of damage along the coast in 1969.
But the sand is still there, it’s white, and for the most part it’s clean. The water is murky and thigh-high until way out, so no one taller than a hermit crab actually swims in the stuff — but even fake beach is excuse enough for people to wear skimpy outfits, play volleyball and party, which is what beaches are really for, anyway.
When the water gets deep enough farther out, fishing is famously good. Anglers pursue snapper, mackerel, flounder, mullet, redfish, speckled trout and other denizens from piers and charterboats in all seasons — which, along with seabreezes that made the coast slightly less steamy than inland plantations, was a key to making Biloxi and its neighbors a popular resort area for almost 300 years.
Then it wasn’t.
“We had depended on the oil economy from Louisiana and Texas for years,” said Nichols. “When the oil economy suffered, those tourists stopped coming here.”
Interstate Highway 10, built to flow about 5 miles above the coastal towns, made it easy for even the non-sufferers to bypass Biloxi for Florida. Biloxi hotels faded when tourists stopped coming, and tourists stopped coming because the hotels had faded.
“We were basically a tourism town without tourists,” said Nichols.
More bad news: Camille, in 1969, crippled what was left of the region’s once-flourishing commercial fishing industry. But that industry was given a needed boost by Vietnamese, whose postwar influx was much like previous immigrations by Bohemians, Poles, Louisiana Cajuns and Slavs, complete with the usual tensions.
“There was a lot of resentment,” said Ronnie Arguelles, dock manager at Pass Christian, east of Gulfport. “The Americans thought they were invading their territory.
“But the Vietnamese are good people. They’re steady workers, they work non-stop and they don’t complain. If it weren’t for the Vietnamese, there wouldn’t be a fishing industry down here.”
Now the industry, though not without problems, is reasonably healthy. But even in the bleakest days, venerable restaurants like Mary Mahoney’s Old French House (awesome crab cakes) weathered storms, literal and financial. The Biloxi lighthouse, shipped here in 1848 from Baltimore, stood tall. Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ last living place, Beauvoir, endured through it all, and so did many other grand homes along the coast. The antebellum Magnolia Hotel (now a museum) was restored over and over and today sparkles like the dew.
Museums survived, and some grew. So did galleries, and so, too, did a coastal mindset that always has been a little different from the, well, less-worldly vision sometimes found within Mississippi’s interior.
“The Gulf really is different from the rest of Mississippi,” said Sara Foster, the artist. “It’s really been settled by people from the city, a lot of New Orleanians, and it’s a pretty eclectic group. It’s a very special place.”
So when voters, on the second try, overwhelmingly approved casino gambling in 1992, all that tradition and history and sense of place was still here. Despite gambling, it still is.
And there’s the difference between Atlantic City and Biloxi: Atlantic City might long ago have dismissed its floy-floy (as Burt Lancaster mourned in Louis Malle’s wonderful movie), but Biloxi, battered as she was, clung to hers.
“We haven’t lost anything of our character because of the casinos,” said Holloway, Biloxi’s mayor since 1993. “We still have sailboats, we still have the Blessing of the Fleet, we have the 4th of July picnics, we have the seafood industry and the seafood restaurants — we still have everything we’ve had for 200-250 years. Plus we have casinos.”
And prosperity. Unemployment, 7.5 percent in 1992, is virtually non-existent; the Beau Rivage’s greatest challenge was filling its 4,200 job openings.
“Anyone who wants a job can find one,” said Nichols.
There’s some tuning, fine and major, to be done.
Unlike Las Vegas and Atlantic City, where casinos are clustered, most of the gambling halls in Gulfport and Biloxi are beyond walking distance of one another. Shuttle service is piecemeal, at best, and taxis are rare. Which means anyone who isn’t doing real well at the Treasure Bay and wants to change his luck at the Copa is probably going to have to drive. That, along with better enforcement, may explain why DUI arrests are up nearly 200 percent since 1993.
“I think by midsummer, you’ll probably see the transportation system changed here drastically,” Nichols said. “That might be optimistic, but it’s something we need to overcome.”
Road expansion is barely keeping up with traffic expansion. Proposals exist for new roads along the town’s Back Bay, which may ease congestion everywhere while encouraging construction of still more casinos — which may add to congestion. That debate continues.
Gulfport’s central business district, to be kind, remains marginal. Revitalization of Biloxi’s downtown, never much anyway, has been spotty; and affordable housing in the town struggles to keep pace with a 15 percent population growth (to 53,400) since 1992.
On the other hand, downtown Biloxi is about to get a new art museum that will incorporate the existing and marvelous George E. Ohr pottery collection plus other regional works. It will be designed by Frank Gehry, architect of the celebrated new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Beauvoir’s new Jeff Davis museum opened near the old house last year, a vast improvement. The school system (led by a bevy of Vietnamese valedictorians) now ranks among the state’s finest, and the area has an arena football team.
All that, plus stuffed whole flounder at McElroys, bun thit nuong at the Pho Ban, baked snapper topped with shrimp and andouille sausage at Vrazel’s, those 12 casinos and not a few pawn shops.
Biloxi is what it is, and it’s just enough of what it was, and it’s still a work in progress.
But up to now, they did it right.
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For more information about Biloxi, contact the Biloxi Visitors Center, 710 Beach Blvd., Biloxi, MS 39530 (800-BILOXI-3); for more about Mississippi, call the state’s Divion of Tourism at 800-WARMEST.
Alan Solomon’s e-mail address is alsolly@aol.com.
