Dr. Casino: How Atlantic City Plays Caretaker
By Ariella Cohen
The room where 72-year-old retired secretary Lisa Barak chooses to vacation is smoky, windowless, and loud with the clamor of a thousand video games in simultaneous operation. A newcomer would hardly qualify it as relaxing. But for Lisa Barak it is a refuge – a place to escape the loneliness, doldrums, and general boredom that too often accompany aging in a society that caters to the young.
In choosing to spend her time and money at the slots, pensioner Barak joins some 70 percent of her senior citizen peers who, according to a 2004 study published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, say they gamble.
On a rainy morning last April, a private bus licensed for travel to Atlantic City parked near an empty gas station in Queens and discharged its passengers – a dozen pleasure-seeking retirees – onto a wet curb. There they had no choice but to wait for a second driver to come and complete the ride. Barak voiced the only complaint: “Doesn’t he know that it’s not good for older people to wait in the rain?” With one hand guarding her curled bangs and the other pointing toward the departing driver, she remarked that the inconvenience was not unusual. Soon, she assured me, another driver would be along to collect the stranded day-trippers.
After a few years of monthly jaunts to Atlantic City, Barak knows the drill: The bus picks up passengers at a bodega on the corner and each person pays $20 for the ride. When you arrive at the host casino, you are issued a $17 rebate in slot credits. Sometimes the bus makes an unexpected stop or two, so you wait a little longer. But by 10 a.m. or maybe 11, you get there — and you play.
“I put in a quarter. If I win, I put two quarters. If I win a third time, I put four quarters,” Barak says, adding that in a typical day the quarters add up to about $100. “So sometimes you wait longer, but everything – the lights, the people, the food – is all about killing time anyway. And then you get home, you’re tired, you don’t think about the loneliness.”
The median age for an Atlantic City gambler is 54. A recently published survey of Iowa adults living in centers for the elderly and retired revealed that casinos placed second only to bingo in favorite entertainment – ahead of museums, shopping, the theater, sporting events, and church activities. In other words, gambling has become America’s favorite way to age – or as some would argue, to avoid aging.
“For a lot of people, it’s their way of staying active, above their humdrum routine,” says David M. Roane, M.D., a geriatric psychiatrist and professor of clinical psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Beth Israel Medical Center. Many of his patients suffer from depression, or have recently lost a spouse or a loved one. For some of them, the desire to visit Atlantic City indicates a renewed energy for living.
“Gambling is not inconsistent with healthiness; in some of my patients it indicates cognitive healthiness,” says Dr. Roane, echoing a recent Yale University study that found a link between recreational gambling and better health for senior citizens. Like the researchers at Yale, however, Roane is cautious about the connection between gambling and good health. “It doesn’t seem like my patients are as interested in winning money as they are in having a good time. They need to get out of the house, and at this point it seems like the casinos are doing the best job of getting them out. But I do wonder about the implications and the costs.”
Lisa Barak lives alone in a condominium complex 45 minutes by subway from Manhattan. Because she doesn’t know many of her neighbors, she avoids going out after dusk. She belongs to a local senior center and three days a week stops in there for $1 meals, Bingo games, exercise classes. Her son lives in Manhattan, and they see one another at least once a week. Still, for Barak the best stimulation comes from a good round of poker video in Atlantic City. “You got to use your head to know which card to save, when to hit. It’s like thinking,” she says.
She was just popping her first quarters into the machine (not real coins: casinos now operate with “coinless” technology that allows all transactions to happen through a computerized credit system) when, back on Brooklyn’s Atlantic shoreline, the cards began to fly at Surf Solomon Senior Center of Coney Island. Bingo is the most popular activity at Surf Solomon, and for each game, 18 or 20 players come out. (The prize is a roll of toilet paper.) Gin rummy and blackjack heat up many a Friday afternoon, attracting a broad group of men and women who are less likely to participate in the center’s “educational recreational” classes, which include Tai-Chi, Hebrew language, singing, and aerobics.
Surf Solomon sponsors a monthly trip to the Atlantic City casinos. Renting a bus for the day costs the center $795, so by charging each rider around $18 – a fee the casinos will reimburse with machine credits before passengers step off the bus – the center is able to subsidize the journey without tapping into any of their own resources.
“I think part of the attraction of the trip is that we charge $18, but they know they will get $14 back,” says Surf Solomon director Grace Brandi. “Always the less a trip or a ticket costs, the more people go.”
In 2002, 321,919 buses carried about 8.1 million visitors — 25 percent of the total that year – to Atlantic City. “Its not surprising at all,” said David Smiley, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at Barnard College. “I would argue that the bus travel is aimed at lower-income gamblers and older people: They pick you up right from your corner and drop you off right [back] at the corner again. These casinos are smart about who they get to the casinos and how they do it.”
Sixty-seven year-old Ernest Richards despises the buses that go to Atlantic City. “They are crowded and everyone is old and you have to leave when they want you to leave,” said Richards, a blackjack enthusiast who works five nights a week as a custodian in Manhattan and hits Atlantic City at least two weekends a month. By car, of course: “Whether I win, lose, or draw I have a great time. I leave my house early in the morning, or late at night – hopefully, miss the traffic – and walk around from casino to casino. I meet people. I laugh.” Richards recalls only one bad time in Atlantic City, a visit marred by a broken-down car and no money to fix it.
Back in Brooklyn, buses chartered by Surf Solomon also shuttle seniors to museums, theaters (in July, 20 people kicked in $35 a piece for balcony seats at Broadway’s All Shook Up), and places like the Botanical Gardens and Bronx Zoo. Yet the casino trips remain a steady favorite. “It’s gotten less popular because a bunch of the people who had been really into going [to Atlantic City] died or moved,” says Surf Solomon’s Grace Brandi. “Still, people want to go, and if we don’t have enough riders to fill a bus we can always stop by the other senior centers. It does surprise me at times when people whose nature is to be, well, not so outgoing with money, manage to find the money to go Atlantic City. But really, I think, people just want to get outdoors, whether it’s to gamble or to go to the theatre – and the casino trip costs less.”
“It’s hard to imagine gambling taking off like this in Canarsie in 1940,” says Bryant Simon, author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (Oxford, 2004). “Then, a senior citizen would have lived in a house – probably with family – within walking distance of a church or a synagogue. Those extended family networks don’t exist in the same way now. It’s not just a paucity of places to go, it’s that people are torn from whole networks they would have gone to in the past; hence what else is there do but take a $25 bus trip?”
Ariel Carty mourns the days when he could pass the time counting steps, rather than cards. Now, the former ballroom dancer says, cities lack the energy he shared as a younger man twirling away the night in the city’s vast swing halls. The casinos are the closest things to that for his senior years; “I like to hear the hollering and the winning,” this 80-year-old says.
Each regular has a host who attends to their needs, knows their birthday and drink of choice. “At least there is a lady asking: ‘Do you want a Coke?’ And you can say: ‘Yes, thank you,’ and she will bring a Coke.”
Ariel Carty’s story does not surprise Bryant Simon. He relates the popularity of Atlantic City among oldsters to a mythic Boardwalk past, the heyday of Steel Pier showmanship and glamour that today exists only in old photographs on the walls of places like The Sands.
A 2002 survey of 100,000 guests at Harrah’s Casinos (a casino chain with 26 properties in 13 states) found that 78 percent of gamblers over the age of 65 play the slots. Seventy percent of casino revenue comes from the slots, which is a good reason to keep players at their stools. “For an older or less confident gambler, the slots are ideal because they aren’t intimidating,” says Dan Heneghan, an Atlantic City Casino Control Commission spokesman. “You don’t have to deal with dealers or rules you might not know, or other players [as] in a table game.”
For the casinos, the quarters add up. In April 2005 the 987 one-armed bandits at The Sands raked in a cool $11 million for the month. The deal, says Heneghan, benefits all parties involved: “Ninety point four percent went back to the players, 9.6 percent went to the house. Our responsibility is to make sure the games are run responsibly, and it seems to me that they are.” He disputes critics who say that the cartoonish designs of the machines seduce folk into treating the machines like arcade games, rather than what they are: automated betting machines at which a player is more likely to lose than to win.
Maryland natives Vera and Joe describe themselves first as church people, second as great-grandparents, third as gamblers. They find the lively atmosphere of the casino a “different” excitement than they get back home with their large, extended family. Vera and Joe bet at about the same frequency and intensity as many of their age group, gambling for the thrill, and using any winnings as a kind of supplemental income. When asked if they put in a lot of money, Joe echoes a popular Atlantic City cliché: “Depends what you call a lot of money.”
The first time they went to Las Vegas, Joe had to call his bank in Baltimore before the end of the first week because he and Vera had run out of money. Twenty years later, they drive up to Atlantic City at least once a month. Five years ago, Vera won $22,000 off a quarter machine at the Sands Casino Hotel on the boardwalk. The great-grandmother of six bought herself and her husband new windows, a new roof, and central A/C for their one-story ranch home. “She’s my good-luck charm,” Joe says as he and Vera finish a late lunch of baked chicken that’s come to them at no charge through the Sands’s hotel’s extensive “gambler-reward” system. (For each $100 wagered, the casinos credit approximately $15 in food and drink.)
That $22,000 win was their last substantial hit, yet Joe and Vera keep coming back. “You never know when you might get lucky again,” says Vera. “As long as Joe can drive, we’ll be driving here.”
In the 2004 census, 91 percent of senior citizens listed Social Security as their primary source of income. While 80 percent of senior gamblers do not get in trouble with the habit, 10 to 15 percent do experience problems, and five percent fall into heavy addiction. Ed Looney is executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey. Six years ago he developed the council’s first senior outreach program; in 2004 its hotline fielded some 20,000 phone calls.
Looney believes that counseling seniors on their gambling requires a fundamental understanding of the fact that retirement often unfolds in distinct ten-year phases. “When you begin retirement, you feel a part of things. As you age, you lose that closeness. Many people 75 and up don’t feel like they’re being included in family events.”
As the decades pass, Looney says, a significant number of retirees develop new needs for companionship and stimulation. “Gambling can be done alone or with others. When you are at the casino, someone is sure to remember your name and be interested in getting you a token for a free $7.50 meal. Can my luck change today? It’s entertaining.”
