Gambling with
our future?
I’m
one of those people who actually grew up in Tacoma. I can remember the
bustling, vital downtown, as it was before the department stores all moved out
to the mall. I can remember shopping at Woolworth’s with my grandmother, where
she’d always buy me a small bag of Spanish peanuts. I can remember going to the
Rhodes Brother’s store, and People’s and Sears and the Bon Marche. But then the
stores all moved to the mall, and the downtown died and became an urban
wasteland.
I
have vivid memories of the 20 years following the flight to the malls.
Seemingly, the area was written off. It had outlived its usefulness. Much of
the downtown was so sad and lonely, considered fit only for vagrants and bums.
Building after building was razed in the name of urban renewal, only to leave a
trail of debris-laden pits as the poignant reminder of the vitality that had
once existed. The picture that sticks most clearly in my mind are the homeless
people covered with newspapers, sleeping huddled in doorways, and the cold wind
blowing down empty streets lined with decrepit, boarded-up storefronts. A ghost
town. My town.
Since the sixties, the
downtown’s gone through numerous incarnations, all designed to revitalize the
area. There was the pedestrian mall on Broadway, for instance. There were the
escalators between streets. It went on and on. But the outcome of most all of
these different plans to jump-start the re-development had one thread in
common: they were unequivocal flops.
Time
passed. Then the Pantages was refurbished, and the Rialto. The Tacoma Actor’s
Guild Theater was built. Voila! A
Theater District was born. Signs of life began to return to the Ninth and
Broadway neighborhood.
More
recently, the Tacoma Children’s Museum, then a tiny establishment located on
Court C, took a bold step and expanded into it’s present building on Broadway.
The location is just two doors down from LeRoy Jewelers, one of the few
hold-out remnants remaining from the faded, glory-days of the downtown’s past.
And
then now, with the neighborhood finally coming back into its own, developers
are proposing to site a gambling casino in-between LeRoy Jewelers and the Children’s
Museum.
A
gambling casino? Exactly how did this come about?
Well,
two years ago, the legislature passed laws legalizing so-called Nevada-style
house-banked card-rooms. The difference between a house-banked card-room and
it’s predecessors is that rather than renting chairs or tables (where the
player pays a set fee to the card-room), with house-banked gambling, you
actually play against the house - just as you would at Caesar’s Palace or any
other Las Vegas casino.
It
doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come to the realization that running a
house-banked card-room would be like owning your own gold mine. And so since
the change in the law, there’s been a flood of applications for the licenses –
84 state-wide, nine of which are proposed for Pierce County.
Alarmed
at the tide of new applicants, and unsure of the issues surrounding the
casinos, the City of Tacoma wisely placed a moratorium on new applications
effective April 8, 1999. The purpose was to allow the city, working together
with representatives from the various interest groups, time to study the zoning
codes to see if new ordinances specific to mini-casinos were needed.
One
possibility it’s reported the city may look at, will be to segregate the
mini-casinos into one certain area or areas – an approach that would have
merit.
Either
way, it makes good sense to study the issues, because we must look before we
leap. In the frenzied rush towards promoting economic development for the
downtown area, there seems to have been an unofficial credo of “anything is
better than nothing,” adopted in years past.
But
history suggests this is not a valid approach to the downtown’s revitalization.
At
present, Ninth and Broadway is unique in that it’s the one single area of
downtown that has family and children-oriented activities. The area has gone to
great lengths to build up and sustain that family-oriented image, trying to
blot-out the bad old past from people’s minds. They’ve succeeded in raising
people’s confidence of the area so they’ll feel comfortable taking their kids
to see a play, or to the Children’s Museum - without having to worry about
getting mugged, or involved in a drunken brawl.
However
well-conceived or operated, having a gambling casino next to the Children’s
Museum just doesn’t make good sense. A casino’s use simply isn’t compatible
with other, more family-oriented businesses, and the potential for problems
out-weighs any possible good.
The
current Ninth and Broadway neighborhood should be viewed as a very fragile
eco-system. My memories of the bad-old downtown as it was for so many years,
are not unique. As fragile as the life of the Ninth and Broadway neighborhood
is, any untoward incidents might very likely be the death knell for some of the
current businesses, like the Children’s Museum. I sincerely hope that does not
happen.