Chloe E. Taft. From Steel to Slots: Casino Capitalism in the Postindustrial City.

Extract

Nevada had a twentieth-century monopoly on legal casino gambling in the U.S. until the May 26, 1978, opening of Resorts International in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In the thirty-eight years since the Garden State’s roll of the dice, a mix of states, tribal governments, and federal bodies have variously appraised and endorsed casino gambling’s utility as a revenue generator, job creator, development incubator, and all-around social good. According to the American Gaming Association, the industry’s trade group, casino gambling today supports 1.7 million jobs in forty states (https://www.americangaming.org/newsroom/press-releases/across-40-states-gaming-generates-38-billion-state-federal-and-local-and-0).

From Steel to Slots: Casino Capitalism and the Postindustrial City tells the story—and assesses the impact and implications—of one case of gambling expansion, the opening of the Sands Casino Bethlehem on land that once housed the Bethlehem Steel plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Chloe E. Taft combines historical with ethnographic research to deliver a monograph that provides a window into the postindustrial remaking of the Bethlehem Steel site. In addition to gleaning sources from collections at Lehigh University, the Moravian Archives, the Bethlehem Area Public Library, Historic Bethlehem Partnership Archives, and the Clarke and Rapuano papers at Cornell University, Taft conducted sixty-four interviews with current and former residents.