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Colorado Casino Town Builds Road to Bypass Competition

CENTRAL CITY, Colorado – As reported by the Seattle Times: "A decade of feuding and lawsuits might have ended last week as this struggling mountain town celebrated the coming of a highway that it fully expects will be a road to riches.

"Hundreds of residents, champagne glasses in hand, poured into the streets Friday as the ribbon was cut on the four-lane, eight-mile Central City Parkway. They hope it will bring gamblers to their doorstep, bypassing neighboring Black Hawk.

"…Black Hawk and Central City — located about 40 miles west of Denver — might share a border, but they are divided by more than a century of hostility.

"A former mill town, Black Hawk always was the poor cousin of cosmopolitan Central City, with its opera and grand old buildings. But the tables turned in 1991, when gambling was legalized in three Colorado hamlets, including these two.

"Black Hawk erected enormous casinos with vast parking lots. Central City, eager to protect its historic architecture, built smaller; parking remained almost nonexistent.

"Gamblers driving up from Denver encountered Black Hawk first. When they did, they usually stopped. Central City's casinos, which once numbered 30, failed in droves while Black Hawk's flourished. The town of roughly 160 people became wealthy, with its 22 casinos pulling in $41 million a month.

"…So local leaders launched an ambitious effort to build a road that would bring people to town without going through Black Hawk. Others believed the rough mountain terrain — both towns sit at 8,000 feet above sea level — would make such an undertaking too difficult…"

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