Word: casino
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...Upon my return to Rainmaker Casino, I find the casino floor jam-packed with players. Families replace the Swingers wannabes from last night, but the end result is the same: high minimum bets and a long wait for a place to play. I make my way through Rainmaker Square, past the buffet hordes and to the high-stakes bingo game. It's a capacity crowd and a serious one inside. Despite the simplicity of the game, the players make of it both art and science. Watching multiple cards while smoking, eating, drinking a cup of coffee, the players eschew idle...
...search of that story, I leave the casino and visit the nearby Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, a structure that might be best described as architectural non-sequitor. It has been clear, thus far, that Foxwoods is at best a poor reflection of and upon Mashantucket Pequot culture. Calling the main casino "Rainmaker" or the frequent player's program "the Wampum Club" seems in exceptionally poor taste. However, I've been assuming that this can somehow be attributed to the general milieu of tackiness of the early `90s, when the casino was first opened, not to any failure...
...museum, though, I begin to question myself and the Mashantucket Pequots. The museum seems to make even less sense in the context of its surroundings than the nearby casino and hotel complex. Designed by New York's Paul Jacob Parkers, who reveals himself here to be the poor man's Frank Gehry, the building makes little attempt externally to interact with its environment, strange given the emphasis one would expect to be placed on such a dialogue here on the rez. Things get both better and worse on the museum's inside. A spiral ramp draws the visitor artfully from...
...come at a price. There is a price, though, and it's paid by the Asian immigrants from Massachusetts, the working class Portuguese from Connecticut and the retirees from all over New England who come out on weekends and drop a few hundred dollars at a time into the casino. For them, it does not seem to be such a winning proposition...
...Mashantucket Pequot reservation, home of the elder statesman of Indian casinos, Foxwoods, Trump is not a popular man. His lawsuit against the government in 1993 charging preferential treatment for American Indians was, at least implicitly, an attack against Foxwoods, which is now the largest casino in the world. So, some speculate, were his comments about the ethnic appearance of his competition. Indeed, there hasn't been a full-blooded Pequot since the turn of the century; members only have to prove they are one-sixteenth Pequot to be admitted to the tribe. Not that they don't try to make...