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High stakes in the high country
To these locals, this town feels like it’s positioned at the dead end of a one-way street. Once known as "the richest square mile on Earth," no one’s struck gold in Central City in more than a century, and the tourism scene based around the town’s Victorian scenery and mining heritage has dried up. The fortunes of Central City and its down-valley neighbor, Black Hawk, were supposed to change in 1990. That year, state voters approved "limited stakes" gambling for these two towns–separated by only one mile on State Highway 119–and Cripple Creek. Slot machines and $5 max-bet blackjack and poker tables were going to bankroll the towns’ historic preservation and economic revival. But the small-time gambling parlors housed in historic buildings of Central City, like the Dostal, couldn’t compete when Black Hawk began making space for Vegas-sized casinos in the mid ’90s. So not only are locals at the Dostal never leaving Central City, the 50,000 slot jockeys and wannabe poker sharks driving up Highway 119 everyday aren’t coming there either. Few people find a reason to go the extra mile beyond Black Hawk. With almost nothing to lose, Central City casinos and town officials are betting the house: They’re building their own road, the Central City Parkway, that will let drivers skip the twists and turns of Highway 119 and ride I-70 from Idaho Springs through 8-plus miles of wilderness directly into Central City and the open doors of its casinos. The new road might turn out some more gamblers, but it will increase traffic along the I-70 corridor and open up a previously inaccessible area of the Front Range to development. Further, this latest round in the high-stakes rivalry between Central City and Black Hawk will complete the destruction of a historic and rural landscape that gambling was supposed to preserve. A rivalry runs awry On May 6, 1859, John Gregory, a Georgia gold miner, struck pay dirt between the present sites of Central City and Black Hawk. Within a month, the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush was on, and 10,000 prospectors made their way up Clear Creek Canyon. Central City emerged as the major town in the mining district and was named the Gilpin County seat when Congress created the Colorado Territory in 1861. One mile down-valley, Black Hawk developed as a mill town that refined and processed the gold of Central City. If Central City was the star quarterback of the gold rush, Black Hawk was the lowly waterboy. Both communities survived boom and bust when others dwindled to ghost towns. More than 100 years after the gold rush, Central City and Black Hawk stuck on the map, and not much had changed in their relationship. Central City attracted Front Range families during the summers to tour old gold mines, enjoy the oldest opera house in the state and peek at the curious Face on the Barroom Floor of the Teller House. "It was a neat, little, historic kind of honky-tonk town," remembers Mary Jane Loevlie, who lives in Idaho Springs and is chairwoman of the town’s Historic Preservation Review Commission. Black Hawk, on the other hand, she says, "wasn’t much of anything." But Central City wasn’t exactly thriving. The town’s sewers and roads were falling apart; the population hovered around 500. Thanks to the completion of I-70 in the 1970s, families began cruising past the quaint yet unrefined mining towns to Summit County and beyond. Colorado voters took mercy on the busted and desperate communities in 1990 and approved limited-stakes gambling in Central City, Black Hawk and Cripple Creek. Central City officials believed gambling would turn the summer tourist industry into a year-round economy that would attract people coming and going along I-70. The town already had former gambling halls and saloons ready to be fitted with slot machines and blackjack tables. Meanwhile, Black Hawk and its 100 residents had little to attract tourists, let alone a significant number of casino owners and gamblers. Through the law, the state assesses a tax on each gaming "device," such as a slot machine or blackjack table, which is then split among the three towns, the surrounding counties, the Colorado Historical Society and the state general fund. When the law passed, Black Hawk pushed to split the gaming revenue evenly between the three towns. Central City balked at the proposition and said the returns should be prorated based on the money each town brought in. In other words, Central City didn’t plan on sharing the jackpot with Black Hawk. In 1992, there were 18 small gambling parlors along Central City’s Main Street and historic district, most of them owned by local businessmen and former town officials. Commercial real estate values and property taxes soared beyond projections and forced out just about any non-gaming business in the historic district, as well as many homeowners. The new boom caught town officials off guard, and the city council passed a building moratorium that year to catch up with water and sewer demands. Caught in the limbo was Stan Fulton, a Las Vegas developer and slot machine manufacturing mogul, who already had plans for a new Central City casino. Instead of waiting for the town to update its sewers, Fulton took his business down-valley. "They were so stiff up there, they never thought Black Hawk would be an option," says Medill Barnes, who manages the Black Hawk’s casino owners association. He says Central City’s moratorium was a calculated gamble to keep money in locally owned casinos. It was a bust. Fulton’s Colorado Central Station in Black Hawk was 10 times bigger than any other in the area, and it opened the floodgates for casino development in the town. Starting with Colorado Central Station, Black Hawk relocated historic homes and dynamited mountainsides for massive new buildings and parking garages. One local woman even preached a few years ago that demolition for a new Hyatt casino had unleashed the spirit of the Egyptian sky goddess Hathor (Hyatt later went bankrupt). Central City backers say their moratorium did not cause the shift in casino commerce. "Black Hawk decided to go balls to the walls and let [casinos] blow up mountains," says Russell Caldwell, senior vice president of Kirkpatrick Pettis in Denver, who helped finance Central City’s planned new road. Whatever the reason, by the late ’90s many Central City casinos had disappeared. As of 2004, there are only four casinos in Central City making a total of $4 million a month. Black Hawk has 22 casinos pulling in $45 million a month. For the first time since Gregory’s gold strike, Black Hawk is the town with the riches and Central City is the town that’s not much of anything. Central City has decided access is the problem: If the casinos can build a road that skirts Black Hawk and brings gamblers directly to town, that will even the odds. Road to riches–or ruin? During the gold rush, Central City travelers came by stagecoach to Golden and then rode mules up to the mining area. When a rail line opened up Clear Creek Canyon in 1871, the Rocky Mountain News called it "the crookedest railroad in the world." Today, gamblers following Highway 119 tailgate RVs and commercial buses and keep their eyes peeled for falling boulders and drunken drivers. On a given day, up to 25,000 cars drive Highway 119. By the time most people get to Black Hawk (average trip time from I-70: 22 minutes), they’re itching to start pumping quarters into slot machines, and the town has plenty of glowing signs and flashing lights to lure folks in. There is one existing route directly into Central City: A snaking dirt track with precipitous drops known as the Oh My God Road. Never mind that curious gamblers who do venture up to Central City find only one sizable casino–Fortune Valley, which is isolated from the town’s historic Main Street. Joe Behm, marketing director at Fortune Valley Casino and the chairman of the Central City Business Improvement District, says the town and its casinos first dreamed up a new road in the early 1990s. Now known as the Central City Parkway, it would run for 8.3 miles from I-70 at Exit 243 outside Idaho Springs into Central City right between Main Street and Fortune Valley. The business improvement district, mostly casinos, was formed in 1998 to execute the plan, but by then access issues extended beyond Central City’s financial woes. According to the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), since 1991 gambling had increased traffic on Highway 119 and U.S. 6 by 300 percent and accidents by more than 200 percent. Planners projected traffic to double over the next 20 years. The state agency started looking at alternatives through an environmental impact statement (EIS) planning process in 2001. The two agendas of Central City and CDOT looked like they might dovetail. But with the future of the town and its casinos on the line, the business improvement district pushed ahead on its own. "We had contemplated [the parkway] well before the gaming area EIS even began," says Behm. "The thought at the time was we need this road now." It was a good thing they did. Based on CDOT models, the parkway "doesn’t relieve congestion on 119 and it creates its own traffic," says Brian Pinkerton, CDOT program engineer. The state wouldn’t pay for the new road, and the town would have to police and plow it. Central City went for broke. The town bought a 150-foot wide swath of land from three landowners and the business improvement district and put out a $45-million, no-equity, high-interest rate bond to cover the construction and maintenance costs. Russell Caldwell sold the bond last June to a small group of investors brought forth by Fortune Valley Casino. Behm expects "up to 500 cars an hour" to use the parkway once it opens this November, which would be half the current volume on 119. The length and the design of the parkway will cut down driving distance for Front Range gamblers (average time from I-70: 12 minutes). But the project is a dicey gamble that people driving the road will play in Central City casinos–and not cruise to Black Hawk. Meanwhile, CDOT planners are still working on a practical solution to the congestion and safety issues on 119. Pinkerton says a draft EIS will be available later this year. The preferred alternative is a new tunnel that casino-bound drivers can catch at Exit 244 on I-70 and take to the top of Highway 119, which will then be widened from two to four lanes (average trip time from I-70: six minutes). Black Hawk casinos would pay $150 million for the tunnel, while CDOT would chip in another $100 million to widen the existing road. Caldwell, the bond salesman, calls the tunnel "a pipe dream," but Pinkerton of CDOT says construction could start by 2006 and be finished in 15 years. Just a façade And so, the latest chapter in this boom-and-bust rivalry between Central City and Black Hawk has spilled onto the interstate like an overturned tractor-trailer unable to negotiate a sharp turn of the highway. A benevolent decision by Colorado voters for legalized gambling has spawned a Frankenstein bent on paving over the landscape. "The solution [to access issues] should be through the auspices of CDOT," says Barnes, the manager of Black Hawk’s Silver Dollar Metropolitan District. Of course, the state agency has endorsed Black Hawk’s tunnel so it’s easy for him to say that. Barnes argues that Central City could have backed the tunnel idea and then built a separate spur from the tunnel’s north end to take drivers to town and skip the last stretch of 119 and Black Hawk. That option would have saved money, reduced traffic, drawn cars off the interstate and meant only one new route. Gambling "is already everybody’s aunt with a shady past," says Barnes. "We should do the right thing." Whatever "the right thing" is. The whole shady side of the family has already taken over Black Hawk. Even though the town has shared gaming money with residents to restore and update historic homes, casinos have manipulated historic preservation by protecting buildings’ façades yet gutting and rebuilding entire structures. The reinvention of Black Hawk as a high-country Monte Carlo has forced Central City to gamble on its economic survival. Even if the parkway doesn’t reinvigorate the town’s casinos, it’s sure to stimulate the real-estate market. The new route opens up previously inaccessible land to potentially thousands of houses. Ren Goltra of Chicago, one of the three landowners who sold land to Central City for the road, received the right to 3,500 water taps, meaning 3,500 homes. Central City manager Lynette Hailey says no plans for development are in the works. But property values along the parkway have already doubled. That’s good news for developers but bad news for wildlife. The parkway will cut through the territory of one of the state’s largest bighorn sheep herds, what Tom Howard of the state Division of Wildlife calls "virgin wildlife habitat." The road and the speculative backcountry sprawl will annihilate the sheep and other animals. "We’re getting used to the idea that whenever you weigh wildlife against the almighty gambling dollar," says Howard, "wildlife isn’t going to win." Clearly, it’s not just wildlife that’s losing here. Gilpin County, home to Central City and Black Hawk, and neighboring Clear Creek County, home to Idaho Springs and the south end of the parkway, both hoped the EIS process would limit construction to just one new route. Instead, the two expanded adjacent interchanges at exits 243 and 244 along I-70 will add a new element of danger to the drive between Golden and Idaho Springs and increase pressure on county emergency services. Both counties are also futilely relying on master plans that limit development in the area of the new road. But any new subdivisions along the Central City Parkway could be annexed by the town and exceed county standards–and make master plans irrelevant. So the Frankenstein smashes through Victorian buildings, demolishes mountains, raids land, kills wildlife and piles up cars along the canyons and the interstate. The path of destruction has led people–inside and outside the gambling industry–to suggest that maybe the two towns should merge. The move might quell the rivalry and get people thinking about how to introduce other industries to sustain the economy before it’s too late. "They’re being forced to compete, and it will affect us," says Mary Jane Loevlie, down in Idaho Springs. "I don’t think we are ever going to be considered rural ever again." Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com |
What happens in Central City stays in Central City," says one of three young men at the bar inside the Dostal Alley Casino. He’s, of course, mimicking the popular tourism slogan for Las Vegas, but in this near-empty Rocky Mountain video poker gallery, it lacks the flashy innuendo of Glitter Gulch. "That’s because no one ever leaves Central City," he says.
