Silent Menace

The William Penn Foundationdemanded silence on casinos.

by Bruce Schimmel

On a recent sunny Saturday, a city councilman got up in front of a crowded auditorium in the Seaport Museum at Penn's Landing, and did something shocking.

An audience of 400 had arrived at 9 that morning to hear what Philadelphia could learn from New York, Portland and other cities that had successfully restored their waterfronts.

It was mid-afternoon, and lunch was lulling the audience to sleep. But they were jolted awake by a comment on a topic about which most longed to hear.

"Casinos are in the mining business," the councilman told the crowd, "and they're here to extract money from you." As applause erupted, I thought we should elect this guy as Philadelphia's next mayor.

But no such luck. Councilman Peter Steinbrueck is serving his third term in Seattle. An architect by profession, he chairs that city's planning committee.

Steinbrueck's remarks had been printed earlier in the Inquirer. And the casino money-mining comment was definitely off-script, which both pleased and concerned the event's organizer, Harris Steinberg.

"I'm glad that I didn't have to say it," quipped Steinberg. Sadly, in fact, Steinberg isn't permitted to say anything about casinos.

When Mayor Street charged the Penn professor last fall with running a public planning process for the central Delaware riverfront, Steinberg had to pledge that casinos would not be on the agenda. Likewise, the group's funder, the William Penn Foundation, also demanded silence on the topic — or else it would yank funding.

Since then, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board has announced that the riverfront stretch will be bookended with a set of casinos — which a plurality of Philadelphians in a recent poll now believe will harm the city.

So when Seattle's Steinbrueck queried, "Are 5,000-slot casinos the only way to power urban revitalization along the riverfront?" his question was met with silence. And it won't be answered when Steinberg's group submits its riverfront recommendations next fall. All Steinberg's group can do is suggest ways to mitigate the traffic.

Being muzzled like that has gotta hurt. Because Steinberg had previously — publicly — suggested some fine ideas about gaming that might have made casinos more palatable today. Two years ago, Steinberg created a report about casino design for the mayor's Gaming Advisory Task Force. To read it now, though, it's as if the Gaming Control Board had read his recommendations only to ignore them.

"Avoid at all costs," writes Steinberg, "monumental, windowless boxes" that are bathed in neon. "They are a sign of desperation," he writes. Yet these are the designs that the gaming commission approved.

Steinberg calls casinos "a large-scale, traditionally anti-urban big money business that can easily deaden its surroundings and wants to corrupt those in the process." He concludes: "Above all, protect the public good."

But protecting the public good, or chronicling all the bad, has barely been addressed — which is the crux of Casino-Free Philadelphia's lawsuit now in the state Supreme Court.

On quality-of-life issues, there is near silence from the gaming commission and from the city. Even the respected independent Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission — forced to create traffic studies before the final sites were announced — won't endorse its own limited conclusions.

There's official silence on health impacts. On light and sound pollution. Gambling addiction. No offical thoughts about loss to other industries — the arts, nightlife, tourism, sports — when I-95 becomes a parking lot. (Casinos depend utterly on the car. But there's nothing about sustainability, or that little inconvenience we call global warming.)

Yet should the petitions and the lawsuits fail, the city's only tool for redress is zoning. Which will be wielded, frankly, by those least capable of city planning. The process of casino zoning will start and end in City Council. And our Council doesn't include a Peter Steinbrueck.

So, ultimately, the Seattle councilman's question about casinos remains unanswered because nobody knows. No city, anywhere, has built casinos along a river, near a crowded highway, and next to urban neighborhoods. This is Philadelphia's own understated experiment. With only Frank DiCicco's upcoming council hearings to break the silence.

(bruce@schimmel.com)