It seems that casinos have cleared another hurdle with a victory by SugarHouse in the PA State Supreme Court and they're poised to break ground any day now according to most of today's news coverage. Foxwoods, apparently wishing that they had hired a different attorney, is choosing to copy the same legal arguments used by SugarHouse and resubmit their appeal to the Supremes. Do the anti-casino forces have any more arrows left in the quiver? I kinda hope so. I've seen two casinos in major cities that aren't Las Vegas or A.C. - Montreal and New Orleans (waaaay pre-Katrina).
In the case of Montreal, the casino is basically out on an island overlooking the St. Lawrence River. There are plenty of windows, to look out. Nice, relatively classy bars distributed throughout the complex and the building itself is at least a little interesting to look at. It's far away from the other main parts of the city and really doesn't seem to affect the quality of life of the more scenic part of Montreal or its residential neighborhoods. In short, it's not so bad.
New Orleans, however, is the first thing I thought about when the issue of casinos in Philadelphia first came up (A.C. was second). It's a fantastic example of what can go wrong. Granted, this is all from a tourists perspective so I have no economic numbers to back it up. The part of town surrounding the casino was totally dead and somewhat craptastic. In fact, the only reason I ended up there was so that I could get directions away from there. Even pre-Katrina, the rest of New Orleans, aside from a few nicer areas (Bourbon Street, the Garden District) seemed not to be feeling the uplifting effects of all those "jobs" and all the tax revenue that the casino was producing. Judging from many other statistical indicators, the state of Louisiana wasn't getting all that much out it either. It makes you wonder, how bad off would it be without them? I ended up linking casinos with seediness, lack of class, and exploitation. We're not talking James Bond in a white dinner jacket ordering vodka martinis. More like a dimly lit room filled with people with bad teeth in sweat suits pumping nickels into a slot machine. But hey, that's just one guy's hopeful vision.
Now, if I were a betting man, I'd say that the odds are that Philadelphia would end up more with the New Orleans experience than the Montreal experience. After all, Canada has had the great idea of providing health care to their citizens for years and we haven't gotten around to copying that. What makes me believe that we could possibly copy their ideas when it comes to casino site selection and design?
On January 7th, this all falls into the lap of the next mayor, especially since the current mayor has been sold on this casino thing, pretty much since the beginning. It'll be up to him to convince a governor who has been championing casino revenue since he was mayor, that maybe we can put these things down in the swamps by the airport where the strip clubs are. If people really want to pull the one-armed bandit, I'm sure they'll find a way there.