The stumbling start for Chicago’s temporary casino prompted an influential City Council member to warn Thursday that the city may be stuck with the gambling den at Medinah Temple indefinitely.
Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd), chairman of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, said Bally’s was undercapitalized to begin with, and he fears the company will run out of money to build the $1.7 billion permanent casino in River West.
Last year, Hopkins and Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) opposed Bally’s plan for both the temporary and permanent casinos.
At the time, Hopkins urged his colleagues not to roll the dice with an undercapitalized Bally’s team with no track record of running a big-city casino, let alone building a massive project.
“We’re hitching our wagon to an inexperienced team. That could come back to haunt us,” Hopkins said at the time.
The disappointing take from Bally’s first full month of operation — down 12% from average daily revenue compared to its first few weeks at Medinah — has Hopkins saying, “I told you so.”
He’s also warning Bally’s permanent casino may never be built, even with the company facing a Sept. 9, 2026 state deadline to get the gaming venue up and running and the city counting on that casino to generate an annual $200 million jackpot to save police and fire pension funds from insolvency.
“Bally’s has already indicated that they’re not in a hurry to start construction on that project. They’re years away from it,” Hopkins said. “They don’t have the money to do it. And they were counting on the cash flow from the Medinah Temple site to fund the construction project and right now, they don’t have it. The signs are on the wall that they’re going to stay (at Medinah) longer.”
“The real risk now is that they turn it into a permanent/temporary site, where it just keeps getting renewed over and over again.”
Hopkins noted Medinah is a hard-core gambling den with “mostly slot machines,” two restaurants, a cafe and none of the entertainment features needed to capture the imagination of a broader audience.
“That’s not what we needed. We’ve been talking about a Chicago-based casino license for years and what we finally end up with after all this is woefully inadequate. It’s really sad. It was one of the biggest mistakes of the Lightfoot administration,” he said.
Mary Datcher, a spokesperson for Bally’s, did not respond to a request for comment.
During Bally’s most recent quarterly earnings call, CEO Robeson Reeves assured investors the Chicago operation was “beginning to build momentum” as they “expand our marketing initiatives.” The Illinois Gaming Board must approve casino marketing plans.
“Our business is ramping,” Bally’s president George Papanier told investors, adding that marketing efforts would launch later month. “It’s showing week-over-week growth, and our space has gone from zero to 27,000 customers in under two months. And, you know, they’ve not been marketed to at this point.”
Papanier also noted Medinah Temple, now closed from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m., will soon become a 24/7 operation.
Reimagining Water Tower Place amid Mag Mile struggles
Hopkins represents a sprawling North Side ward that includes parts of North Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s premier shopping district.
The Magnificent Mile has struggled, with a 33% vacancy rate that includes the giant hole created at Water Tower Place when Macy’s closed in early 2021.
Two devastating rounds of looting after the 2020 murder of George Floyd didn’t help. Neither have a steady string of strong-arm robberies, carjackings and smash-and-grab incidents.
The Macy’s space is “highly unlikely to ever be leased out to a single tenant again,” Hopkins said.
He expects it to be divided up as part of a larger mixed-use transformation of what was once the nation’s first and premier vertical mall.
“Water Tower Place does have some plans that they’re working on to revitalize it. It would involve reducing the retail footprint of the mall, possibly down to as little as three floors out of the seven and converting the rest to other uses, like medical office space and experiential types of things like we had there recently — the Harry Potter exhibit and some other things that have been successful there,” Hopkins said.
Dave Franecki, a spokesman for MetLife Investment Management, declined to provide any update about plans for Water Tower Place.
Hopkins expressed confidence that something “exciting and fresh” will be done to “save” Water Tower Place.
“That would be a strong signal to the rest of the Mag Mile, ‘Don’t give up yet. There’s reason to have hope and we have the ability to turn things around,’” Hopkins said.
Contributing: Mitchell Armentrout and David Roeder
