This hotel puts Bell Gardens on the map. Its a place where people come to dine, to gather, to have meetings, and of course, to play poker. -- Governor Jerry Brown, November 18, 2015
Local Luxury
The Bicycle Club Casinos brand new hotel is a black and white, seven-story destination. The 100-room hotel with luxury suites has a spa, a VIP gaming room, and several dining options including a brewery. The chandelier in the hotel lobby is glittering glass made for a night out. The most beautiful piece of furniture in the lobby, however, is the reception desk carved from azure geodes forged into sheets of glass tile that radiate a warm light below. At night, the hotel glows violet, backlit by an LED billboard as big as the building. Thirty years after the Casino first opened in Bell Gardens, the dream of a massive luxury hotel finally came true.
The sign illuminates eight lanes of the neighboring 710 Freeway. In contrast to the new monument to luxury, the gritty Long Beach Freeway leads into the post-industrial heart of Southeast Los Angeles. Thousands of eighteen-wheelers trucking in the majority of exports into the United States from the Pacific Rim make this the busiest highway with the most accidents in the state. The transported goods that make their way into every store across the country all pass by the Bicycle Club and the thousands of families who live along it.
Though the extravagant casino in Bell Gardens stands in great contrast to the surrounding working class communities, its relationship to the city is complicated. And as intimately tied as it is to the local economy, it is also an insular world that aims to draw outsiders (and keep them there for as long as their pocketbooks permit.) The hotel and casino complex takes up about three city blocks. With the new amenities in place, and a small necessities store that also just opened inside, customers have a full-service city inside the Casino.
Though the Bicycle Club casino has been a fixture in Bell Gardens for decades, the hotel was finally opened late in 2015. Photo courtesy of Bicycle Club Hotel and Casino.
The clientele consists mostly of older and middle-aged Asian men and women, some who rushed to catch their casino bus, others who take their time at tables concentrating on their hands. The d cor reflects the majority of the customers: ornate gold dragons adorned a faux pagoda that housed higher-end card game room. In another section, a future Jade Room, will be a renovated space for people to play games, including: Blackjack, Texas Hold Em, Seven Card Stud, Omaha hold em, Mexican Poker, Pai Gow Poker, Three Card Poker and Baccarat. The high stakes rooms with tens of thousands of dollars on the table are a whole other group, a more affluent demographic thats flying in from Macau on their way to Las Vegas. For them, the Citadel Outlets and our local Casino are a warm-up for the bonanza of high-end label shopping and turned up lights of Sin City.
But the folks playing at the tables in the large main room reflect more of working-class Bell Gardens. Whats more interesting is the staff: workers, from custodians to security were Latino, Black, Middle Eastern, and Asian-American. They tell jokes, keep an eye on the floor, and interact with ease --a near miracle for communities who are constantly pitted against each other in every other way out in the real world. Here, they work together to run the Casino like the steady machine it has become.
Beyond the parking lot are modest stucco homes, a taquer a, a Fosters Freeze thats at least 40 years old, an intermediate school with aging buildings, and down the freeway, factories and warehouses filled with part-time wage labor force working full-time hours. Four miles away from the Casino in Vernon is the Exide Technologies battery recycling plant that used to emit noxious fumes, like a cloud of bleach hovering over schools and homes. The plant shut down to avoid facing Federal criminal prosecution for decades of lead and arsenic pollution. A full impact study and thorough cleanup of the plant and its surroundings have yet to be completed; the plant was causing headaches, nose bleeds, and insistent coughing.
On the day of the hotels soft opening this past November, at the corner of Eastern and Florence Avenue, about twenty local residents and activists from Communities for a Better Environment were trying to get the attention of Governor Jerry Brown who was in attendance. The protesters yelled, Jerry Brown dont mess around! Jerry Brown clean our town! The Governor signed a law that helped close the plant in 2015 and residents wanted to follow up.
Weve been trying to get him to talk to the people in this community for years, one protester said about the Exide waste. Weve never gotten a call back from his office. Maybe hell listen now. Protesters said that although the plant was closed down, the surrounding area has not been properly tested or treated for lead presence in the water supply, the soil, or the air. The state has not met with CBE, the families in Vernon where the plant still sits, or the surrounding southeast residents. Activists dont want to wait until their water and soil cause an environmental disaster as shameful and deadly as the one in Flint, Michigan.
When the chants became too loud, one of the emcees joked that, Theyre just mad because theyre not invited. Some in the crowd enjoyed the poke-in-the-ribs, but for the people demanding help from their governor before its too late, their pleas were no joke. Nonetheless, the Casino and the City of Bell Gardens have a mutually beneficial relationship. A representative for the hotel said that the Casino supports the local community with their scholarship programs that benefit both their employees children and the local communities. With the addition of the hotel, the Casino predicts that they will be able to offer even m
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This hotel puts Bell Gardens on the map. Its a place where people come to dine, to gather, to have meetings, and of course, to play poker. -- Governor Jerry Brown, November 18, 2015
