Gaudy Night: Seneca Niagara Casino
< Gaudy Night: Seneca Niagara CasinoPosted:
Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
 Where old folks go to waste their pensions.
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Prologue
Last weekend Torry Mendoza and myself went up to Niagara Falls for a studio visit with painter Jay Carrier. Coincidentally the Seneca tribe own a gaudy ass casino which is smack dab in the middle of downtown-a stones through from Niagara river, the American Falls, and our hotel. Not wanting to miss out on an opportunity to patronize an Indian casino-something I have never done before-we walked over one frosty night to check it out. However, this is not a blog about the pros or cons of Indian gaming. I would never be so presumptuous as to argue for or against it, nor would I make declarative statements about it. The reason being is I do not know much about the history of gaming on or around reservations nor do I know much about the reservation system, land rights, federal treaties, state taxes, etc.-all of which plays a part in the gaming institution.
This is merely a blog about my personal observations regarding this Indian casino for not all Indian casinos are alike nor are they all successful ventures. The social, legal, and tax issues surrounding gaming are far too complex for broad generalization. So I will refrain. However, I can say unequivocally that I hate casinos whether they are in Vegas or Reno or on the fringes of reservations across America. Casinos fucking suck. I find them tedious primarily because I hate losing money and losing money is what happens in casinos. I hate the desperate chain-smokers hoping for the lucky break that never comes. You’d think they would have it figured it out by now-you missed! You will never make that easy slot-machine score so stop wasting your pension/unemployment/welfare/residual money. Of course, this didn’t stop me from wasting a few bucks of my own money on a disgusting buffet and a slot machine. Total-$25.00, considerably less than most of the patrons at the casino.
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 Chain-smoker/Cheap Liquor Drinker Paradise-Inside Seneca Casino
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The casino is the ugliest piece of architecture this side of downtown Denver. That’s pretty fucking ugly. It’s a crass ’scraper in the skyline of a sad city that actually has seen better days. The only competition for Tallest Building in Niagara-The Days Inn. Pretty fuckin’ sad. Two hideous blights on an otherwise charming, if abandoned, riverfront town. Niagara’s city status is going to be reduced to a township since so many people have left for more promising locales.
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 This Indian restaurant was closed cause the other Indians lured all the customers away.
American Indians-1/Eastern Indians-0
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 Casino buffet hall with teepee-table motif.
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 “World Cuisine” Buffet: Mexican tacos, Italian pizza, Chinese wonton, Southern mac&cheese, New England seafood.
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Our first order of business was the all-you-can-eat buffet figuring it was cheap and a good place to start our investigation. Firstly, it was not cheap. $20.00 bucks to be exact. Secondly, the food was the frozen processed shit that obese Americans seem to enjoy (see sample above). By “American” I mean white people as the crowd in the buffet hall were mostly that with a smattering of Blacks and Asians. I do not enjoy cheap food. In fact I am quite a food snob. Don’t get me wrong, a Tostinos frozen pizza is a tasty processed treat every now and again, but those fuckers costs .85 cent not twenty dollars. I was immediately pissed off. I’ve seen better buffet spreads at Shonie’s-that obese Southern American favorite. I was also disgusted by the amount of seriously gluttonous face-stuffers. A middle aged man sitting at the table to the right of us had four helpings of desserts before our waitress took our drink orders. Admittedly that took about five minutes, but damn that’s a lot of frozen pie in five minutes. An elderly man sitting alone at the table to the left of us treated himself to a large glass of milk to go along with his plate of peel & eat shrimp with a glob of cocktail sauce. Gross!
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 Happy Torry-before the coffee arrived.
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I barely ate a thing from that plate you see pictured above. Actually, I wasn’t even attempting to I just wanted you all to see the type of crap available at an Indian Casino buffet. But I admit I tried since I paid twenty bucks but I couldn’t stomach it. I did, however, enjoy the pecan pie even if it was semi-frozen. Torry managed to eat his plate of food, though he wisely chose to stick with one theme, Southern-style vegetables and some sort of pasta dish. We both ordered cups of coffee which tasted like they had spiked it with whiskey. Ordinarily I might not object but I am also a coffee snob and this shit was disgusting-whiskey or not. Torry, on the other hand, will, and does, become verbally abusive if he is made to drink bad coffee (just ask Renee Gick. HA!).
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So we questioned the waitress as to the freshness/alcohol infusedness of the coffee. She proclaimed herself innocent of spiking our drinks saying she made the cups fresh from a machine that you stick individual packets of coffee in and it processes it on the spot. Well that almost sent us both into a tizzy. Neither one of us drink coffee from those type of machines! We sent them back and left in time to miss an influx of old people who had finished their rounds of gambling. The line to get a table spilled out into the casino hall-about 100 or so old people clamored to get in. I almost yelled, “Beware the processed frozen food!” But from the looks of that crowd it wouldn’t have deterred them. Besides the majority of them were there for the giant crab legs, peel & eat shrimp, and dessert bar. And since they were mostly seniors they’d probably scarf it down with a large glass of milk. Vom-o-rama!
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Slot-Machine Heaven
Though Torry is against gambling in general I convinced him to play at least five bucks in the interest of investigative journalism, or at the very least, sit with me while I wasted my money so I could take some surreptitious pictures of the obsessed gamblers.
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The Seneca casino is primarily a slot-machine enterprise. I saw only a few rows of Blackjack tables, and maybe three Roulette rounds. No one played roulette. Perhaps their dealers took the night off, but more than likely, the old-timers and working class stiffs who patronize the casino don’t understand the game preferring to stick to the slot machines and uncomplicated mathematics of Blackjack. One thing for sure, their smoking kept paced with the pull of the slot machine handles which was every five seconds or so. Puff, pull, exhale. Puff, pull, exhale. It did not stop. Fortunately there was a non-smoking area for gamblers. We made our way through the giant dimly lit smokers hall (see inside view of casino up above-all smoking section!). I felt like cancer had infected my every pore by the time we made it to the tiny non-smokers area. It was barely populated but brightly lit and right next to the cashiers window. I borrowed two bucks from Torry and changed my singles to a fiver. I found a prime spot from which to take photos. However, I was so distracted by the idea of doubling, tripling, maybe quadrupling my five investment that I barely took any except for the sad displays below. At one point my five was up to twelve bucks. Torry advised me to cash out but, like most suckers, I felt a big win was looming.
I lost it all and rather quickly.
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 Redemption ATM
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 Torry loses Ten
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 Last Roll Loser.
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Torry and I felt the desperate desire to win big creep up on us. Perhaps with another twenty or so we could win it all back and more? We briefly pondered the ATM conveniently located right next to us but a middle aged woman with the walker pictured above ambled up before the notion sank in. She was a sad sight that jolted us back to reality. We then remembered the sad saps inside the buffet hall gobbling up garbage food eying the KENO screens hovering above their heads. We knew better. We got up right away and walked out into the cold night musing on how easy it is to fall prey to the desperate desire for an easy score. Grateful in the knowledge we are no suckers we made our way across the street to the Starbucks for a good cup of coffee.
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Epilogue
It was eight o clock on Friday night when we left the casino. The wind had picked up. Icy rain fell intermittently. After our Starbucks visit we walked back to the hotel a block away. The downtown area was deserted save for the Canadians from across the river, old folks from the city of Buffalo and the work-a-day losers from the country side-all of whom were heading to the casino. Torry and I were the only people out on the street. Of course it was windy and icy, but it was about the same earlier that afternoon when we arrived, desolate. <
The city of Niagara Falls New York enjoyed an illustrious past with millions of visitors per year. Industry was built along the river, and the famous Nabisco factory offered stable employment and economic vitality. However, times have changed. Now it is empty, reduced to a township with crumbling but still beautiful buildings, abandoned to squatters and a casino offering false hope to people left with their sad vices. Puff, Pull, Exhale.
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Regardless of where it occurs, or which ethnic group stands to gain from your loss, the institution of gambling is a hopeless venture. Unfortunately, many people don’t see it that way. Gaming is pitched as a fix-all for an ailing economy. But when the cash infusion doesn’t manifest as planned the community wants someone specific to blame and in Western New York, specifically in Niagara Falls, that someone is the Native American community. The Seneca and Tuscarora, two separate tribes, are blamed for the economic decline the city has been in for the last two decades. It’s a complicated, emotional powder keg of an issue-land entitlements and tax breaks for Indians but none for those who are not. It would be interesting to see an in-depth investigative documentary on the effects of the casino in the region developed by an impartial group.
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A sad end to our trip: Torry and I purchased our last cup of coffee at the local Starbucks, parasitically located across the street from the casino, on Sunday morning before our last visit with Jay Carrier, the next artist in residence for NAICA’s upcoming winter edition. While adding fixins’ to my beverage we overheard a few state troopers in town for some state troopers ball held in some downtown building also across the street from the casino. They were loudly discussing the effects of the casino on their region. One stated he would never support Native Americans economics gesturing across the street to the hideous building. “Native American economics? What the fuck is he talking about?” I wondered out loud hoping he’d hear me. He didn’t. Then he proclaimed the Indians “money grubbers” or something to that effect. I was dumb-founded by the profound dumbness of his statements. They went on to discuss the pros and cons of gambling at Indian-run casinos vs Vegas/Reno casinos claiming you could never win big at an Indian-run casino and besides which they never share their earnings with the state so no one should patronize them anyway.
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I don’t pretend to know much about the minutiae of Indian gaming laws as they pertain to state/city kick-backs but I do know that it does not make up Native American economics and it certainly does’nt warrant the obvious racist overtones emanating from these three state-paid troopers who are supposed to serve the public-ALL of the public-including Indians whether they own a stake in a casino or not. Sad, really fucking sad.
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