LEDYARD, Conn. -- Even if you build it smack in the middle of a place
called Great Cedar Swamp, they will come. You can bet on it.
Provide free parking and add more casinos and bingo halls and hotels and
restaurants, and the odds are that they'll keep on coming in ever greater
numbers just as long as the waters flow, the grasses grow, and the slot
machines continue to pay off.
In only a few years, the separate gambling complexes operated on their
ancestral reservations by two small and once impoverished Native American
tribes have made this rural and formerly somnolent corner of southeastern
Connecticut one of the most-visited places in New England.
Between them, the Mashantucket Pequot tribe's enormous Foxwoods Resort
Casino complex here and the Mohegan tribe's smaller but still very large
Mohegan Sun casino a few miles to the west in Uncasville attract an estimated
17 million or more visitors a year. The two reservations are just a few
minutes from Interstate 95 and only about a two-hour drive from both Boston
and New York, an hour or so from Providence and Hartford. The vast majority
of visitors are day trippers. Quite a number are almost daily trippers.
However, as attractions and amenities multiply -- the sprawling Foxwoods
complex now includes three hotels, a deluxe health fitness spa, and a superb
museum of Native American life -- the area is rapidly evolving into a major
travel destination. Tribal officials estimate that annually about 1.2 million
casinogoers stay over at least one night in the area.
Many visitors come mainly to try their luck but also take time from the
gaming tables and slots to look around. Both nearby Mystic Seaport and Mystic
Marine Life Aquarium -- the area's chief tourist attractions not so long ago
-- report substantial increases in visitorship since the casinos opened.
Besides offering gambling options galore, the Mashantucket Pequot and
Mohegan casinos are lavishly decorated, have a variety of restaurants and
lounges, offer upscale shopping, and regularly feature name entertainers. Even
if you're not much of a gambler (and this writer isn't one at all), they're
fun to check out. There is nothing else in New England remotely like them.
Certainly no amount of publicity or advertising hype prepared me for the
reality of Foxwoods. To reach it from I-95, you take Route 2, a meandering
two-lane country road. Suddenly, without warning, the 18-story Grand Pequot
Tower, glossy centerpiece of the complex, looms like a mirage out of the
scraggily forested and lonesome-looking landscape of Great Cedar Swamp.
``Gee, Toto,'' I muttered to myself when I first saw it, ``I don't think
we're in Connecticut any more!'' In fact, I had just entered the Mashantucket
Pequot Tribal Nation, which has its own government, police and fire
departments, customs, and traditions.
Established in the mid 17th century, the reservation was almost abandoned
in this one as the Pequots assimilated, intermarried, and dispersed into
mainstream America. Until a dozen or so years ago, there wasn't much left to
see here except a few battered house trailers occupied by members of the then
newly reorganized tribe.
In an effort to achieve economic self-sufficiency for the tribe, gambling
was introduced to the reservation in 1986 but confined to a single
high-stakes bingo hall. In 1992, after being turned down by local banks, the
700-member tribe borrowed some $60 million from a Malaysian casino company
that appreciated the value of a good location and built Foxwoods Casino.
The following year, the State of Connecticut authorized slot machines in
the casino in exchange for a quarter share of the revenues. Ever since,
Foxwoods has been on a roll and the tribe on a building spree.
Today, Foxwoods is the largest gambling casino in the world. And the world
includes Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and Monte Carlo. Hey, the casino's parking
lot is probably bigger than Monte Carlo.
There are five gaming halls (one nonsmoking) containing 370 table games and
5,750 slot machines. The cavernous multipurpose room seats 3,700 people for
bingo, and doubles as a performance space that can hold up to 5,000. The
performance that opened the room was by a suitably outsized performer:
heavyweight tenor Luciano Pavarotti.
Open 24 hours a day, the Foxwoods gaming rooms pull in an estimated $1
billion a year. Also profitable are the 23 retail stores, one of which, Indian
Nation, sells only upscale Native American arts and crafts. Ditto the 30 food
and beverage outlets. The most popular restaurant -- perhaps because eating
there takes the least time away from gambling -- is the Festival Buffet, which
serves over a million meals a year.
Money makers as well are Foxwoods' three hotels -- Two Trees Inn, Great
Cedar Hotel, and the new and splendiferous Grand Pequot Tower -- which between
them have more than 1,400 rooms. The posh Grand Pequot literally towers over
the countryside. (Amenities include a luxurious and fully equipped health and
fitness spa modeled after the imperial baths of ancient Rome.)
The Grand Pequot is Foxwoods' signature building and also a highly visible
symbol of the new prosperity and increasing financial clout of the tribe. The
tribe's last prosperous era was more than three centuries ago when, as now ,
it had an unfailing source of income: seashells from the Connecticut shore.
Strung together as beads and subtly colored by salt water, the shells became
``wampum,'' the Native American trading currency.
The tribe is now happily back in the modern equivalent of the wampum
business, and the Foxwoods color scheme uses the various shades of mauve,
beige, and blue found in the clam and quahog shells commonly used as trading
beads. Other decorative motifs draw upon nature and are based on indigenous
floral and leaf patterns. But the most visible -- and audible -- Native
American decorative touch is the Rainmaker statue, which stands at the heart
of the gaming complex.
The statue is a 12-foot-high clear plastic representation of an Indian
hunter who every hour on the hour fires a laser beam arrow into the air as an
appeal to the Great Spirit. In response, the sound of thunder and the crackle
of lightning roll through the bingo halls and slot machine rooms, and
artificial rain showers rain down into the basin of a fountain.
An also entertaining but far more serious expression of the tribe's pride
in its past is the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, about a
quarter of a mile from the casino complex. A $193 million project, the museum
uses state-of-the art technology -- including interactive computers and
multisensory diormas -- to tell the story of the Mashantucket Pequots and the
other tribes of the region.
During a visit, you descend by escalator into a replicated 18,000-year-old
glacial crevasse and wander through a remarkably realistic re-creation of a
mid-16th-century Pequot village. Covering half an acre, the village consists
of a dozen bark wigwams and is filled with the sounds of birds and Indians at
work and play and populated by more than 50 life-sized and anthropologically
accurate figures. Artifacts displayed at the museum range from ancient Native
American tools, weapons, and handicrafts to the beat-up typewriter that tribal
chairman Richard ``Skip'' Hayward used to successfully apply for federal
recognition of the Mashantucket Pequots, their first step toward economic
revival.
The museum theater shows a film about the nation's first Indian war in
1637. This was between the Pequots and the English settlers of Connecticut and
Massachusetts and their Native American allies, the Mohegans, who were led by
a sachem, or chief, named Uncas. The Pequots were almost wiped out, and the
survivors eventually were forced to move inland to a reservation on the east
bank of the Thames River, about 10 miles from that of the Mohegans -- now the
village of Uncasville.
The once rival tribes have long since buried the hatchet and together cut
a deal with the state, giving them exclusive casino rights in Connecticut. The
well-marked and heavily traveled route between the two casinos crosses the
Thames over the Mohegan-Pequot Bridge.
The Mohegan Sun (the name means ``Wolf Rock'') casino, which the
1,200-member tribe opened in fall 1996, is a low-rise concrete structure much
less dramatically sited than Foxwoods. There are 20 restaurants and lounges
(one bar is called ``The Bow and Arrow'') and a shopping concourse with shops
selling Native American handicrafts, among other things. But there are no
connected hotels or a tribal museum.
The gaming casino has 3,000 slot machines, 180 gaming tables, and a
high-stakes bingo hall. This is about half the size of Foxwoods but still
makes Mohegan Sun the third-largest casino in the country.
While the decor of Foxwoods might be described as tasteful Las Vegas, that
of Mohegan Sun is aggressively aboriginal. The walls and ceilings are covered
with Indian signs and symbols, along with blankets, basket, bows, snowshoes,
and animal skins. The decor may be low-tech early Native American, but the
casino itself is a very contemporary operation with computerized self-service
betting and giant projection screens for off-track betting.
Although different from each other, both Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods have one
thing in common: As with all casinos, the odds alway favor the house. Or, in
their cases, the wigwam.
Published 01/17/99 in the Boston Suday Globe's Travel Section.
