It has finally happened. The Tampa Bay area has finally reached the apex of corporate cultural homogenization. The Wal-Mart of rock music is coming to town. That's right, we're getting a Hard Rock franchise.
And it's not just your mother's Hard Rock Café, where you can pay a huge conglomerate good money for the privilege of doing their advertising for them by buying and distributing their logo on T-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, keychains, baseball caps, shot glasses and sundry other nonessentials.
This is a new breed of Hard Rock. This Hard Rock has gone beyond simply co-opting a symbol of the counterculture and making it a mainstream moneymaking machine. This one represents the marriage of corporate cultural imperialism and Native American opportunism to bring you gambling. Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to the $100-million Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino.
Now you can not only buy junk bearing the Hard Rock logo, but also play Bingo and shove what's left of your money into gaming machines that simulate the Las Vegas experience, complete with show bands and DJs blaring from Floyd's, the adjacent restaurant and nightclub.
And you can do it all on Orient Road just east of downtown Tampa where the old Seminole Indian village used to be. The chickee huts, nature boardwalk, alligator wrestling and admittedly cheesy combination souvenir shop and museum are long gone. The old water tower with the arrow through it visible from I-4 is long gone.
But don't worry; you'll still be able to find the casino from the expressway. Now you'll just have to look for a 12-story hotel tower bearing the famous Hard Rock logo. It won't be hard to spot.
Phase I of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino opens June 17 at 1 p.m. The old casino will remain open right up until the moment the new one opens, so you won't even have to put out your cigarette before breaking out a fresh Bingo card in a brand-spanking-new place with, I am told, a better air-filtering system.
And there's lots more good news: All traces of the tribe have not been wiped out to build this shiny new shrine to one of our favorite vices. There is, of course, the word Seminole in the title. Big Joe's Sports Bar is named after an alligator that was bullied for the amusement of visitors at the old gator-wrestling shows in the village. And the patchwork designs of the Seminoles will be a repeating motif in the casino décor and staff uniforms. There will also be a marker on a spot at the casino entrance currently designated as a sacred burial site.
Sarcasm aside for the moment, the casino probably really will be a fun place to visit, especially compared to the dark, stinky old spot it's replacing. The comfortable sports bar is a sports-freaks' paradise — with a sports ticker and a giant wall of televisions where you can watch up to 14 different events at once while talking to your bookie on the cell. The addition of low-stakes poker tables will at least introduce an element of thinking gamesmanship to the passivity of playing Bingo and the machines. And Floyd's restaurant has a very appetizing lunch and dinner menu with reasonable prices. Unfortunately, the casino does not feature a concert venue like the one in Orlando, so we won't be seeing any actual headlining rockers (and maybe no rock at all) at the Hard Rock Casino.
It is also true that the new casino will probably bring more money to the Seminole tribe. The press packet says that more than 90 percent of all Seminole Tribe income is derived from its gaming operations at its five casinos in Florida. That income funds tribal government expenditures including health care, education and social services. In addition, each tribe member receives a monthly stipend. After the shameful treatment of Native Americans by the U.S. government and European settlers, there is a certain poetic justice in seeing them make money by exploiting our vices.
And, of course, there's that almighty economic impact on the broader community. It is likely that the hotel and casino will lure unimaginative conventioneers and pasty tourists and their dollars from Orlando and the Gulf beaches in a way that nothing else in Tampa has ever done. Maybe some of that money will benefit the community as politicians and business people are always promising they will. The casino and hotel will definitely create some jobs, though most are low paying and tip-dependent service-level jobs.
Perhaps best of all, the casino is fully compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act and is built to withstand a Class 4 hurricane. That means if you have to evacuate, you can take your great granny there and let her play Bingo while you slam tequila and watch boxing — even if she's not fully ambulatory. It would sure beat the neighborhood school gymnasium.
Senior Editor Susan F. Edwards can be reached at ed@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 122.
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2003.