From Steel to Slots: Casino Capitalism in the Postindustrial City by Chloe E. Taft (review)

Scholars and journalists often tell the story of deindustrialization as a tragic and complete rupture from the past. Mobile capital exits town, leaving only empty buildings and broken lives. Whatever replaces industry, whether a warehouse, data center, or nothing at all, is radically different from what came before. There is much that is accurate about this narrative. Plant closings certainly devastate communities, but the process of deindustrialization is rarely as neat or linear as this tragic narrative suggests. Chole Taft reminds of us this important point in From Steel to Slots, her outstanding and compassionate account of the aftermath of the closing of the Bethlehem Steel mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This wide-reaching book makes important contributions to scholarship on deindustrialization, the casino and steel industries, postindustrialism, historic preservation, and urban redevelopment. Taft disrupts often-assumed temporalities of capitalist development and exposes how everyday life in a former steel town bridges the past and present, sometimes for the better of local residents and more often for the worse.

As the book's title suggests, From Steel to Slots focuses on the transformation of a former steel mill into a Sands Casino, arts center, community college, and other "postindustrial" activities. Rather than follow a linear history of deindustrialization, each chapter presents a different slice of how Bethlehem residents coped with, made sense of, resisted, and participated in the postindustrial transformation of the city. Early chapters provide a broad overview of the history of Bethlehem, from the arrival of the Moravians in the 1700s to industrialization to the closing of the steel mill. Beginning in the 1930s, city leaders and residents tried to attract visitors by restoring Moravian sites and branding Bethlehem the "Christmas City." More recently, this wholesome version of Bethlehem's history came into conflict with the state and city's decision to embrace casino gambling. The Sands Casino, in turn, vaguely referenced the industrial history of the site to elicit residents' and the city's support.

In later chapters, Taft takes readers onto the floor of the Sands Casino, where she carefully unpacks how workers, gamblers, and residents made sense of this seemingly radical shift in the local economy. Many considered the casino an inevitable and even beneficial rupture from the industrial past. Strangely, many residents, having witnessed the exodus of industry, embraced the casino and the "idealized vision of entrepreneurial self-achievement" that it and its owner Sheldon Adelson represented (106). Other workers imposed their old expectations of industrial employment onto the casino. They saw it as a "postindustrial factory" that differed in few ways from the mill that preceded it. This is one of many instances where Taft shows how residents neatly collapsed their experiences of working and living in an industrial and postindustrial city.

In later chapters, Taft examines how Bethlehem residents developed "a racialized language of decline" in response to the changing demographics and economy of Bethlehem (186). In one chapter, she explores how white working-class residents responded to the closure of Catholic parishes. They often lamented the "decline" of their old neighborhoods and attempted to contrast their experiences with those of the Puerto Rican migrants who followed them. Another chapter explores how casino workers and Bethlehem residents stigmatize the mostly Chinese visitors who ride buses to the casino every day from New York.

Taft completed sixty-four interviews with seventy-six people and did extensive archival research in Bethlehem. She also did ethnographic research in local churches, the casino, and other sites. From Steel to Slots is not only thorough scholarship, it is also a great read. This is in part a credit to Taft's interesting interviewees, but also to her talents as a storyteller. She takes readers along as she trespasses across an abandoned mill site with a former worker, who eventually confesses that he visits frequently. During another interview, a steelworker casually pulls his heavy tool belt out from under...