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Mayor Wendell Butler remembers the Chester he knew when he was growing up as a thriving city with a bustling downtown.
"We had everything - bowling alleys, theaters, department stores, even big entertainers like Ray Charles came through," Butler said. "We were the Mecca of Delaware County."
But the last five decades have been hard on the city south of Philadelphia on the Delaware River. Its manufacturing base all but disappeared and suburban malls took the shoppers, leaving poverty and blight behind.
The city lost nearly half its 65,000 residents. It stands today without a supermarket or a single fast-food restaurant.
But hope has appeared on Chester's waterfront in the form of Harrah's Chester Casino & Racetrack, built on the former site of the Sun Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co., which once employed thousands.
The harness track opens Sunday. When the casino opens in January (pending final state approval), the enterprise will employ up to 900 people and bring millions of visitors to Chester every year.
"We're coming back," a smiling Butler said Friday, standing on a downtown street with more than half its properties shuttered. "It will take some time, but we're on our way."
It won't be easy.
While there's no doubt the track and casino will bring some jobs to Chester residents and a hearty shot of revenue to the city budget, it's unclear whether the gambling enterprise will generate any spinoff development, beyond a gas station or pawnshop.
"Harrah's is not a panacea. We know that," said David Sciocchetti, director of Chester's economic-development authority. "It's part of a strategy to broaden and diversify our economic base."
And thanks to major tax incentives, some other pieces of the strategy have fallen into place in recent years - a trash-to-steam plant, a new state prison sitting next to the Harrah's site, and, most remarkably, the Wharf at Rivertown, a large, historic office building on the Delaware that's home to 1,200 jobs.
But those projects are dispersed along the city's riverfront, separated by acres of blight and industrial sites. They've had little if any effect on one of the saddest-looking downtown areas you'll ever see. Whole blocks of Chester's once-prosperous city-center are boarded up.
"We didn't get any business from the Wharf," said Judy Hwang, who owns Chester Pizza on 7th Street. But she's glad to see the casino coming. "If it gives people some work, maybe it will help. It can't hurt."
Sciocchetti knows that gamblers won't be thronging to downtown Chester looking for nightlife. But with the huge number of people coming, he says, there has to be some potential.
"This will bring in 3 million visitors a year," Sciocchetti said. "Overnight we will become the most visited tourist site in the Philadelphia region, and this creates an opportunity for entrepreneurs to capture some of the value of that traffic."
The city has just finished widening and landscaping Route 291, and there's plenty of available real estate if someone perceives enough opportunity to invest.
Sciocchetti figures that with time, the city could have some gas stations, restaurants and retail to capitalize on the heavy traffic. Officials say developers have also expressed interest in residential development along the waterfront, but no deal has been struck yet.
Vince Donlevie, general manager of the Harrah's track, said the struggling community of Joliet, Ill., has experienced an economic turnaround, in part because of the Harrah's casino there.
But Robert Goodman, a Hampshire College professor who's studied the economic impact of gambling in Joliet and elsewhere, is skeptical about Chester.
"They're going to get some tax revenues and some jobs, but Chester is not going to become a tourist destination, and you won't see a lot of spinoff businesses, other than those directly related to the casino, like pawnshops," Goodman said.
And Goodman said based on other cities' experience, you can expect at least 1 percent of Chester's adult population to develop a gambling problem, and that carries a social and monetary cost that must be weighed against the benefits.
One benefit Mayor Butler foresees is a huge boost in city revenues. The casino will contribute at least $10 million a year to the city, roughly 30 percent of Chester's annual budget.
Butler, a former police chief, said the first thing he'll do is hire more cops.
Darrell Jones, president of the Chester chapter of the NAACP, said he doesn't expect the casino to spawn much new business, and he wishes the troubled school system were getting a piece of the action.
"Too many of our students don't have the skills they need to get jobs," Jones said, "so the school district could have used some of that money."
Harrah's contributed $500,000 toward job-readiness training, and more than 100 Chester residents have graduated from the program. So far, 59 of the roughly 160 people hired to work at the racetrack are Chester residents.
But there's an obstacle to placing large numbers of Chester residents in the casino as employees: State regulations bar anyone with a felony in the last 15 years.
State Rep. Thaddeus Kirkland, D-Chester, is pushing legislation that would ease the restriction.
"I'm not talking about rapists and murderers," Kirkland said. "But where people have done some things in their past and have changed, gone to school, picked up a trade and raised their family, they should have an opportunity to have their records expunged."
Mayor Butler said he'd welcome the change, but thinks it will be hard to accomplish.
Always looking for signs of hope, Butler pointed to renovations to downtown Chester's transportation center, which includes the train station and bus stops.
As he spoke, an Amtrak train roared though the station at breakneck speed. Chester hasn't been a stop on the Northeast Corridor route for years.
"But, you know, for years, we didn't have taxi service here," Butler said with a smile, "and now we've got that back."
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