At Hard Rock, good neighbors build wall

You might think the gambling operation might bother the neighbors. You'd be wrong.

By THOMAS LAKE, Times Staff Writer
Published November 18, 2007

Some people call Joanne O'Brien, 62, the unofficial mayor of East Lake Park, the neighborhood across from Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. O'Brien is thrilled about the expanded gambling operations at the casino, and hopes that the Hard Rock will attract a higher class of people with it.
	[Melissa Lyttle | Times]

TAMPA - To the east of Orient Road is a casino where the lights on the ceiling glow sunset pink.

Inside you see a white cape worn by Elvis, and you see women in leopard print. You smell tobacco smoke, and you hear the seductive jangling of the Hexbreaker machine, and Shakira, wailing about the curves of her body.

To the west of Orient Road is a neighborhood: middle class, if that still means anything, with a cat-shaped mailbox, a child's swing set, a hammock draped from a live oak, a house with red poinsettias at the front gate.

In a typical story about land development, this is the part where you would meet the Angry Homeowner. This homeowner would be brandishing a petition, muttering about riffraff and eyesores, radiating the spirit of rugged individualism. This story does not have that part.

After the governor signed a deal to let the Seminoles offer more kinds of gambling at their Florida casinos, including blackjack and baccarat, a reporter knocked on more than a dozen doors in East Lake Park to see if the neighbors were worried.

They were not.

Some were indifferent, as if it were possible to ignore a neon-studded tower just beyond your back yard. But several described feelings that one does not necessarily expect nongamblers to have for the overseers of a gambling emporium. Trust. Gratitude. Goodwill.

"They've done everything they've said they were gonna do - and then some," said Joanne O'Brien, 62.

These good relations are built on a wall, thick and strong and nearly 8 feet high, that shields the neighborhood from the noise and spectacle of the casino. It is not on the property of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. Nevertheless, the Seminoles paid for it.

When work began on a new two-story wing at the casino, East Lake residents like Jeri Barron worried that guests in the Fresh Harvest restaurant would be able to look down into their back yards. So casino president John Fontana pledged to make the wall higher.

"Jeri and I are good friends," Fontana said. "My promise to Jeri was that we'd never have a guest on the second floor without that wall in place."

Barron, a 50-something medical transcriptionist who lives with her poodle, P.J., said casino officials went out of their way to accommodate her. They researched botany to figure out what kind of vegetation would keep her pool out of sight without encroaching on it through underground roots. The solution: a tall green thicket of transplanted bamboo.

Besides mitigating frustration, the casino offers neighbors some actual benefits. When the casino opened about four years ago, East Lake Park became one of the few suburban neighborhoods in the Tampa Bay area - if not the only one - with employment, fine dining, drinking, dancing until 6 a.m., poker, video bingo and Bo Bice concerts all within walking distance.

O'Brien is a retired Long Island bus driver who is known by some as East Lake Park's unofficial mayor. On Thursday, she sat on her front porch in the deepening twilight, talking about gambling. To her left, at the casino's entrance, a 50-foot guitar flashed its yellow neon strings.

O'Brien said she was not worried about the clients that blackjack and baccarat might attract. She expected them to have more class than the drug dealers she said she has chased from her neighborhood.

She seemed especially excited that under the new deal with the Seminoles, the state of Florida will get a taste of the profit.

"I think it's fantastic," she said, rubbing her hands together. "More money for us."

Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report. Thomas Lake can be reached at tlake@sptimes.com or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6245.

[Last modified November 17, 2007, 22:32:16]