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The Horseshoe Casino Cleveland will open in late March on
four floors of a renovated department store overlooking Public
Square in the heart of downtown.
The casino will have 2,011 slot machines, 63 table games and a
30-table poker room.
Instead of offering in-house live entertainment, the casino will
bet on drawing visitors who are also interested in other
Cleveland attractions including its sports teams, the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and its busy theater scene.
``Rather than saying, `Come to Horseshoe Cleveland' and just
come into the casino and stay the entire time, we're actually
connecting to the city,'' the casino's manager, Marcus Glover,
said during a year-end construction tour interview.
``We'll provide first-class amenities in terms of leveraging the
amenities around us in the downtown corridor with the fine
restaurants and hotels that are down here, as well as the venues
and other attractions.''
The city likes the idea of an estimated 5 million annual casino
visitors strolling through downtown to shop, eat and sample the
attractions.
``It's important for the casino not to be just an enclosed
shrine to betting,'' said Chris Warren, Cleveland's chief
of regional development.
With walkways and pedestrian tunnels linking the casino to the
sports complex and Tower City retail-office complex, ``you have
a unique constellation of really high-visitor, high-marquee
venues that will be connected,'' he said.
Plans for the initial casino phase call for a buffet restaurant
and a food court with three outlets. The casino eventually will
expand to include a newly built casino overlooking smokestack
industries along the serpentine Cuyahoga River.
By comparison, Caesars Palace Las Vegas has 14 places to
eat, plus shops, a spa and high-end entertainment including
Celine Dion during the New Year's weekend.
The Cleveland casino and one planned for Cincinnati will be
operated by a joint venture between Caesars Entertainment and
Rock Gaming, run by Dan Gilbert, owner of the NBA's
Cleveland Cavaliers and founder of Quicken Loans.
Quicken Loans Arena, home of the Cavaliers, is within sight of
the casino and the Ritz-Carlton hotel, which the casino recently
purchased, adding to Gilbert's expanding footprint in Cleveland.
The initial casino phase may have a familiar look for movie
buffs. It will be in the old Higbee building, which played a
starring role in the 1983 film ``A Christmas Story.'' Planners
have tried to preserve its retro look, right down to the
original doors.
Two years ago, Ohio voters approved plans for four casinos,
including locations in Columbus and Toledo (Hollywood
Casino) to be run by Penn National Gaming.
Casino opponents, led by church groups, fought the vote and
warned that gambling hits the pocketbooks of the poor the
hardest. Cleveland, with a poverty rate of 34 percent, ranks as
the nation's third-poorest big city.
Les Bernal,
executive director of the Stop Predatory Gambling Foundation
in Washington, D.C., predicts a litany of gambling-related
problems will result in Ohio from casinos.
``Ohio is about to unleash one of the biggest public policy
failures in America over the last 40 years,'' he said.
``It's going to increase the level of personal debt, it's going
to create tens of thousands of new gambling addicts, it's going
to develop an economy based on phony prosperity and it's going
to ultimately result in higher taxes and worse budget deficits
for the people of Ohio.''
Brian Davis, a community organizer with the Northeast Ohio
Coalition for the Homeless, said it's an open question
whether any economic benefit from a casino would outweigh
additional demands on social services because of gambling
addicts, debt-ridden gamblers and other issues.
In either case, a casino will simply add an additional outlet to
the betting opportunities already available, he said.
``People who are struggling with gambling addiction find ways
even if they live in Cleveland right now,'' in the pre-casino
era, he said.
A
key selling point in the casino campaign was creating jobs.
Cleveland's casino will have about 1,600 employees and initial
job postings in recent weeks have drawn tens of thousands of
applicants. The $350 million project is expected to create 2,000
construction jobs.
Cleveland's jobless rate was 9.1 percent in November, with
nearly 17,000 people looking for work.
The casino also raised hopes of spinoff jobs, from initial
construction work to expanded restaurant and tourism employment.
Brandt Evans, whose Pura Vida restaurant sits a
half-block from Horseshoe Cleveland, said he is confident the
casino will thrive under Gilbert's hard-driving leadership.
``If my projected sales increase, I'll definitely have to hire
at least 10 to 15 more employees,'' said Evans, whose restaurant
opened seven months ago and employs 23.
John Krajewski,
50, a sheet-metal worker, is an early job success story. He
landed work installing heating and ventilation equipment at the
casino after being laid off 20 months and now expects to
patronize the casino when it opens.
``I see Cleveland starting to grow again—the `Comeback City'
that it was in the ‘80s,'' he said during a lunch break with
fellow hard-hats.
The job has given him a chance to resume planning for his
retirement.
``My (investment) funds are starting to kick back to what they
were and I'm making a decent living like I was before,'' he
said.
Krajewski may reflect the blue-collar base of the casino. He and
his wife occasionally travel to a casino in Niagara Falls,
Ontario, but expect to give the Cleveland casino a chance.
``I'm not really that big of a gambler, but I would come down to
monkey around on the slot machines,'' he said.
Glover said he isn't concerned about the casino's odds of
flourishing in an increasingly crowded Midwestern gambling
scene.
``Ohio will have four casinos. Today, Ohio has no casinos.
Everyone who lives in Ohio who wants to partake in gaming
activities leaves the state today,'' he said.
``So, there's considerable amount of support leaving Ohio today
to go participate in gaming activities in bordering states,
Indiana, Pennsylvania, Michigan. So we feel pretty good about
having the prospect of only having one casino here in
Cleveland.''
But Glover already has his antennae out for the possibility of
seeing further dilution of the gambling pie if Ohio horse race
tracks offer slots-like video lottery terminals.
``Tracks, if they do eventually get the VLTs, pose some level of
cannibalization,'' he said. ``But we'll have a different
offering than those tracks will have.''
Glover promised the casino would have an opulent look—“very rich
textures, very rich color palate, very masculine color
palate”—and said he's confident City Hall would keep the area
neat and safe.
Asked about the potential for panhandlers and vagrants outside
the casino's front door, Glover said he wasn't deterred.
``We feel good about what the city of Cleveland is going to do
in terms of devoting police force and other services to make
this area a much more vibrant area,'' he said.
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