The River Gives Again: Riverboat Gambling Comes to Metropolis

By the nineteen eighties, Metropolis faced the economic pressures common to small Midwest towns: population decline, limited industry, a shrinking tax base. The Ohio River, which had been the reason for the town's founding in eighteen thirty-nine, was about to become its lifeline again. In nineteen ninety, the Illinois General Assembly passed the Riverboat Gambling Act, permitting floating casinos on the state's waterways.

Metropolis was among the first communities to take advantage. A riverboat casino opened on the Ohio River in Metropolis in nineteen ninety-three, later rebranded as the Harrah's Metropolis Casino, a floating casino that became one of the largest employers and one of the largest sources of tax revenue in all of Massac County. For a city with a population of fewer than six thousand people, the economic impact was substantial.

The casino drew visitors from across southern Illinois, western Kentucky, and the greater region, many of them coming specifically to Metropolis who would not otherwise have had reason to. The riverboat gambling era reflected a broader pattern across the Midwest in the nineteen nineties, as states competed to capture revenue from an activity their neighbors had already legalized. For Metropolis specifically it was one more chapter in the long story of a town that has always bet on the river to provide.

The Ohio gave it its founding logic, its freedom geography, its two most celebrated natives, and eventually, its casino.