A gamble in the woods

Tribal casinos have transformed a once-quiet corner of connecticut

By William A. Davis, Globe Staff, 01/17/99

IF YOU GO . . . The Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun gambling complexes are open daily, 24 hours a day. Both are about a two-hour drive from Boston and a 15-minute drive from each other. For Foxwoods Resort Casino, which is on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation in Ledyard, Conn., take Interstate 95 south to Exit 92 to Route 2 west. To reach Mohegan Sun, in the village of Uncasville, Conn., take the Massachusetts Turnpike (Interstate 90) west to Interstate 395 south. Take Exit 79A and follow Route 2A for less than a mile to Mohegan Sun Boulevard, which leads directly to the casino. Parking is free. There are three hotels in the Foxwoods complex: Two Trees Inn (room rates $140-$175), Great Cedar Tower ($150-$25), and Grand Pequot Tower ($175-$260). For information and reservations, call 800-369-9663 or 860-885-4777. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is 1 1/2 miles from Foxwoods Casino, signposted from it and Route 2. In winter, it is open Monday-Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission: adults, $10; seniors (55 and older), $8; children (6-15), $6. For information, call 800-411-9671. The area's two other main attractions, Mystic Seaport and Mystic Aquarium, are both in Mystic, Conn., eight miles from Foxwoods. From I-95, take Exit 90 and follow the signs. Mystic Aquarium, 55 Coogan Blvd., is undergoing a $52 million expansion. It recently added 30 new exhibits, including a whale and dolphin pavilion. Winter hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Admission: adults, $13; seniors, $12; children (3-12), $8. Mystic Seaport, 75 Greenmanville Ave., as an ongoing project is building a replica of the slave ship Amistad (subject of a recent film by Steven Spielberg) in its preservation shipyard. There is also an exhibit on the slave revolt aboard the Amistad and how it influenced pre-Civil War America's attitude toward slavery. Mystic Seaport's winter hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. Admission: adults, $12; seniors, $10; children (6-12), $6. For more information about Mystic and southwestern Connecticut, call 800-836-6569.

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.