Where the freighter traffic on the Calumet River has dwindled from a half-dozen ore boats a day to the occasional foreign ship delivering steel to a neighborhood that used to make steel. Where the Bluesmobile jumped the 95th Street bridge. Where that big empty field at 87th and Lake Shore used to be a steel mill that employed 20,000 people. That would be the Southeast Side, the corner of Chicago that never recovered after the Rust Belt era ended. And although we’re long past pretending that the purpose of gambling is to save the state’s waterfronts, there's a section of the city that resembles those old river towns, both in its history and its current condition. Now, thanks to a bill passed in this spring’s session, casino gambling is coming to Chicago. (To comply with state law, it sits in a pit filled with a few inches of water.) Then, in 2011, the state planted a casino on land, in Des Plaines. That ended in 1999, when dockside gambling was allowed. Throughout the 1990s, the boats were required to cruise during gambling sessions. The fiction of riverboat gambling didn’t last long. Closer to Chicago, “the boats” were moored on rivers in the satellite cities of Elgin, Aurora, and Joliet.
Louis, promoting them as modern iterations of 19th Century Mississippi gambling boats.
The state plunked floating casinos in Rock Island, Alton, Metropolis, and East St. Thirty years ago, when the Illinois General Assembly voted to allow riverboat gambling, the idea was to help faded river towns bypassed by modern transportation and technology.
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