Insight on the News: Casino of the Sun simply stunning: the Mohicans didn't die out. They're living

The invitation was irresistible. "Come visit the Casino of the Sun" it said. Have fun. It promised a detailed and lingering tour of a vast new $1 billion complex whose architecture and decor would stun the eye, and it spoke alluringly of grand restaurants guaranteed to please even the most fastidious palate.

It also promised "a legendary gaming experience" and entertainment of many kinds, all on the same spot: the Mohegan Sun, a vast complex that spreads across the landscape of Eastern Connecticut along the Thames River, a few miles north of New London.

It all belongs to the Mohegan Indians -- the same tribe that James Fenimore Cooper wrote about in The Last of the Mohicans and which he mistakenly thought was gone from the face of the Earth. Five years ago these American Indians opened the Casino of the Earth -- 180,000 square feet of gambling and entertainment space that is generating annual earnings of $700 million. Now the press has been invited to witness the tribe's new addition, the Casino of the Sun, which increases that space to 315,000 square feet and offers a long list of other "gotta-visit" attractions: 22 new restaurants and retail outlets, in addition to the old section's 18, for a total of 40.

In April 2002, the Mohegan Sun's 34-story hotel is scheduled to open. Mohegan officials say they expect the center's earnings to climb to $1 billion in one to two years, despite the recent economic downturn and the war on terrorism. They also predict that 3,500 new employees will be added to the already more than 10,000 now working at the center, making it a major employer in New England.

The Casino of the Sun's opening was low-key. Originally plans had been big time: "Pyrotechnics and much else" Mohegan Tribal Council Chairman Mark Brown [see Picture Profile, p. 36] tells Insight. But the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 put the quietus on those plans. Officials opted for a ribbon-cutting ceremony along with a long moment of silence for those lost at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.

A large American flag hung during the short ceremony. Tribal elder Ernest Gilman -- a career Navy man, now retired, whose Mohegan name is Kiwa -- lit a small fire that sent a slender column of smoke into the air, chanted for a short time in what was said to be Mohegan and then translated: "Thanks be to the Creator. The Creator is good. Enjoy!"

It was a short and sweet introduction to the vast new casino. Insight has visited other Indian gaming places all over the United States, including Foxwoods, the Pequot tribe's humongous eastern Connecticut casino only 18 miles distant from the Mohegan tribe's undertaking. But the Mohegan Sun's invitation had promised something different from the standard gambling scene: a place intended for more than a center for gaming and good times, even though those are its prime purpose; a complex that in addition would convey what it means to be a Mohegan. And, to an amazing extent, it delivers on that promise.

Slot machines of course are everywhere -- more than 6,000 of them -- along with other games -- blackjack, roulette, craps, baccarat, to name only a few. And most of the 40,000 or so souls at opening day appeared to be avidly engaged in making use of them all. What's different at the Mohegan Sun is that, first, the place is noticeably less gaudy than most casinos (though it assuredly glitters spectacularly) and, second, there's been a conscious, painstaking effort to weave the tribe's own history and mythology into the complex's art and architecture, right down to the smallest detail.

A casino short on gaudiness? Well, yes. It's one of the first things, for instance, that Sal (Mohegan employees wear name tags bearing their first names only), a 22-year veteran of the gambling business, tells Insight. Sal says he helped "bring gambling to Atlantic City [N.J.]" then worked at gaming houses in New Orleans (which he didn't like because "folks there prefer drinking to gambling") and on the Gulf Coast. Sal is now a floor manager at Mohegan Sun. He quickly runs down casinos in Las Vegas. Why? "Because there's too many gaudy lights there. Not like here."

It's a sentiment shared by tribal elder Gilman. The Mohegan Sun is "nothing flashy," he insists to Insight. "I wouldn't have it any other way." It's a matter of tribal pride. Gilman, now 67, is the grandnephew of the Mohegan tribe's most esteemed member and medicine woman -- Gladys Tantaquidgeon, who was born in 1899 and now is 102. It's a relationship that has helped him keep his Mohegan origins always in mind. "I always knew who I was and where I came from," he says, even when his employer, the U.S. Navy, sent him far away. He's pleased with the Mohegan Sun because there's so much of the Mohegan "past in the place, so many things I know as a Mohegan."

The plans to make it all as Mohegan as possible were in gear from the beginning. Tribal leaders early on handed David Rockwell, head of Rockwell Architecture, and his associates a 300-page summary of Mohegan legends, art, crafts and oral history. "They grasped it so quickly" tribal leader Brown tells Insight. "They think like we [Mohegans] do now."

It was a task that Rockwell and his designers were pleased to undertake. "It was a dream-come-true project," says the famous architect, simply because it wasn't just filling a big empty space with eye-catching dazzle. "It was a chance to convey the stow, history and aspirations of a particular people, the Mohegans, in a dramatic way."

Bellagio, the Las Vegas casino, famously has $300 million worth of Picassos, Monets and Van Goghs in its lobby to attract whatever culture-hungry gamblers may exist. The Mohegan Sun itself would become its own work of art, a kind of theme park of things Mohegan.

How to do this? For one thing the designers took symbols common to Mohegan baskets, belts and tribal regalia (such as a four-dome design and another called "the tree of life") and made ample use of them throughout the complex.

There are carefully beaded designs on ceilings, and in the 300-seat cabaret there are exquisite tiles that symbolize earth, wind, fire and water. "A huge group of craftsmen worked on the place" Edmond Bakos, one of Rockwell's assistants, tells Insight, a claim that's probably true. Almost everywhere one casts an eye there's been a great deal of effort expended on detail: burlap blended into plaster walls, for example, to create a rough texture, or glass beads in plaster to convey the feeling of the drying-up period after a storm in "Rain" one of the Casino of the Sun's several upscale restaurants.

The Mohegan tribe's traditional closeness to nature is a main theme. A huge canopy suggesting a turtle shell covers a gambling area for nonsmokers. In Mohegan mythology, the world took shape as a small group of islands on the back of a turtle standing in a giant pond. The Mohegans are known as the "wolf people" and, throughout the complex, stuffed wolves that look as live as they once were hover on ledges above casino patrons, their heads turning right and left, their tails twitching.

There's an 85-foot waterfall, too, which attracted the interest of Tom and Trudy Goodrow, residents of nearby Uncasville, Conn. They read about the falls and decided to come see it. The waterfall is named Taughannick Falls because on a tribal migration the Mohegans, according to legend, passed through the Taughannick Mountains "where there were many waterfalls." The Goodrows call themselves "recreational, five-or-six-times-a-year gamblers" and Tom, a retired industrial engineer, holds one of those large cups used to catch the winnings from the slots. They tell Insight that they used to fly down to Atlantic City to gamble and are delighted that now there's a casino just next door.

The waterfall is eye-catching but, right in front of it, and at the halfway point between the older Casino of the Earth and the new Casino of the Sun, is what may be the single most extraordinary object in the whole Mohegan Sun -- a 25-foot-tall, 14-foot-wide Dale Chihuly sculpture made of 2,500 sections of blue, clear and silver glass that seem to turn, twist and writhe even though they move not at all.

The sculpture weighs five tons and looks like the huge splash that might have happened if a 10-ton boulder had slid over the Taughannick Falls. The Seattle-based Chihuly has become world famous for his work in glass, his chandeliers having created a whole new definition of what a chandelier can be. Not surprisingly, Chihuly's Mohegan Sun sculpture is a crowd-pleaser. Nine of the 10 people' Insight asked what they thought of it didn't pause a second before replying,. "Beautiful!" The 10th waited a moment, then said she liked it okay but added that exactly what it was remained a mystery to her. Mohegan officials won't say what they paid for it, but the price reportedly was something slightly more than $1 million.

Fittingly, the centerpiece of the Casino of the Sky is a huge planetarium. The domed ceiling shows the heavens as they were in May 1994, when the Mohegans celebrated their official federal recognition as a tribe. There's Orion and the Big Dipper and a huge full moon that travels across the sky. Hot-air balloons make the trip, too, in breathtaking groups of as many as five. And there's a jet plane that flies from one horizon to the other, followed by its vapor trail.

Directly under this big sky is Wombi Rock, three stories high and made of onyx. The words "Mohegan Sun" are a bilingual pun. Sun meaning the bright star nearest Earth in English, but in Mohegan "sun" means rock -- and some kinds of rocks (quartz in particular, of which onyx is a variety) are sacred to the tribe. The onyx, brought from Pakistan, Iran and Mexico, was fused with glass in Italy, then brought to the United States and assembled on the spot into the large, hollow boulders that make up Wombi Rock.

A gambling-free bar graces the top of Wombi. It offers a great view of the planetarium sky and a bird's-eye look at much of the Casino of the Sun. On each table is a menu listing 53 varieties of martinis. Plush, overstuffed easy chairs allow guests to stare at the moon and stars, which is exactly what John and Carol Brokaw of Ocala, Fla., are doing -- hypnotized, like most everyone else in the bar, by the ongoing display.

John, who works for Flack + Kurtz Inc., is an engineer who helped plan the casino's plumbing. In a month, he'll go on to another job in Chicago. Neither he nor Carol are gamblers, but they love to just look, and Carol likes to shop. "Why watch my money disappear into a slot machine when I can buy something real" she says with a laugh.

One can visit stores here as varied as Boccelli (handbags), Godiva Chocolatier and The Golf Shop, each of which Carol had investigated that day. There's also Nostalgia, which specializes in 1940s and 1950s memorabilia and was very popular on opening day as fiftyish and sixtyish couples jitterbugged there to golden oldies introduced by a local disc jockey in a gold-lame tux jacket.

At one of the shops that specializes in American Indian items, visitors can purchase a small book, The Lasting of the Mohegans. Published in 1995 before the opening of the first casino, it discusses at two or three places how "non-Indian money was ... disdained by traditional Mohegans" and how some Mohegans centuries ago "embraced Christianity due to its espousal of anti-money philosophies," points-of-view that seem to be the author's editorializing and directly at odds with the existence of the hugely profitable Mohegan Sun. But some few Mohegans -- including tribal chairman Brown's own brother -- were cautious about the tribe opening a casino. What changed minds (or so most Mohegans will tell you) was what money could do to revive Mohegan culture and language and sustain the tribe's members.

A very few first-day visitors to the Casino of the Sun weren't terribly impressed and said so. A Chinese-American businessman from New York City who is eating at Joseph White's Summer Shack, a casino eatery specializing in seafood, tells this writer and Insight photographer Rick Kozak, "You guys should get to A.C." This confuses us at first until it dawns on us that "A.C." is Atlantic City, whose atmosphere he most definitely prefers.

But mostly this crowd likes the Mohegan Sun and likes it a lot. A shy elderly lady who takes me for a casino employee walks past without stopping. "You people have it over all the other casinos," she says with a big grin.

Julia Mason, an African-American from New York City, came on a bus for the opening. She's a bit disgruntled because the trip was a long one with police stopping trucks in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center. She's standing by the Chihuly sculpture and claims she'd like to dismantle the sculpture and take it home with her. It's a big thing, she says, but she likes it a lot and she'd find a place for it. "I love it" she says. How does she like the whole place? The new Casino of the Sun and the older Casino of the Earth? "Donald Trump, eat your heart out!" she replies, and turns back to look at the sculpture.

Stephen Goode is a senior writer for Insight magazine.