Site of Newport Grand, which closes Tuesday, has had many lives

NEWPORT — The Newport Grand building was the site of jai alai games for slightly longer than it was a slots parlor.

The jai alai fronton operated from 1976 until 2003 for a total of more than 27 years, while video lottery terminals, an upgraded version of mechanical slot machines, will have operated there from 1992 until Tuesday, for a total of about 26 years.

Twin River Management Group, the operator of Newport Grand, will shut the establishment down Tuesday at 11 p.m. and open expanded gambling operations with table games at the new Tiverton Casino Hotel on Saturday.

Carpionato Group of Johnston purchased the Newport Grand property from Twin River in early May for $10.15 million and announced it plans to create a mix of retail, restaurants, office space and perhaps a hotel on the site, but those plans are still being worked on.

The Carpionato development will be at least its fifth life for the property, which went from farm to city dump to jai alai fronton to slots parlor to commercial site in less than a century.

Origins of Newport Jai Alai

In the early 20th century, the property was still called Malbone Farm, adjacent to the estate bearing the same name. When exactly it became the city’s municipal dump is unclear, though after speaking with many older residents, it is safe to say that happened sometime mid-century.

Arthur W. Silvester Sr., a native of Weston, Massachusetts, brought jai alai games to the site when his fronton celebrated its grand opening on May 27, 1976. He had purchased the former dump site from the city in 1975.

He had previous success in the field. He opened a fronton in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1954, which had a total handle of $25 million in 1975, according to the Florida Racing Commission as cited in a Daily News story from May 1976.

Silvester told a Daily News reporter at the time that he expected a daily handle of $250,000 in Newport. His players, mainly from the Basque region of Spain, would play 10 months a year and return home for two months each year, he said.

He invested a total of $8 million in his Newport Jai Alai site, $6 million for the building and its furnishings and $2 million for the land and the stock of the original investors in the Newport jai alai concept, who had called themselves the Tourism & Development Corp. That corporation won approval for jai alai in a city referendum held on July 10, 1973, and originally wanted to lease the land, according to Newport Daily News articles that year.

The building had a 7,000-person capacity and Silvester was expecting a sellout crowd in the early days. But on the day of the the grand opening, management said a total of 2,700 people turned out and there was a total wager of just over $51,000, the Daily News reported at the time. Silvester was disappointed, but predicted wagering on the game would grow in popularity as it caught on with more and more people.

In jai alai games, players whip the balls off one of three walls, made of granite in Newport, with a hand-held cesta. Considered a variation of the Basque game pelota, jai alai dates back to at least 1875, when the term was coined. A player in Newport, José Ramón Areitio, accelerated the goatskin ball to 188 mph on Aug. 3, 1979, setting a world record for that kind of ball and weight, according to an online Jai Alai Chronology that says the event was “widely reported.”

The players went on a much-publicized strike in 1988 for better pay and working conditions. Replacement players were hired and the striking players picketed and went to court to be reinstated and receive back pay. They won a victory in 1990 before a National Labor Relations Board administrative judge, who ruled in their favor.

The slot machine era

The Silvester family successfully petitioned the state for permission to introduce video lottery terminals to Newport Jai Alai in 1992. Citizens Concerned About Casino Gambling, a group founded in Newport, opposed the installation of the VLTs and members picketed outside the building, but it was a losing cause.

The state Lottery Commission allowed the slot machines, maintaining there was betting on the jai alai games and the installation of the video slot machines was not new gambling.

However, jai alai games remained an offering at the site until July 2003, after owner and CEO Diane Hurley, Arthur Silvester’s daughter, received permission to do away with the sport there.

The General Assembly included a provision in the budget that year that said: “Commencing July 1, 2003, the Division of Racing and Athletics shall be prohibited to license Jai Alai in the city of Newport.”

“Although generating a substantial profit on video slot machines, Hurley said the facility was losing more than $2 million a year on the game itself,” the Daily News reported on June 30, 2003.

Jai alai players, 33 in all, and support staff protested at the time that their employment had been terminated abruptly.

Mike Warner of Newport, the announcer for jai alai matches, was quoted at the time saying, “We were put out on the curb like yesterday’s garbage.”

One of the players, Txomin “Barry” Arambarri, told The Daily News he started playing jai alai in the Basque region when he was 6 years old, came to the U.S. in 1987 at age 17, played one year at the West Palm Beach fronton, and then played in Newport for 15 years before he was fired.

The Newport Grand Jai Alai name, adopted in 1997 after Newport Jai Alai underwent extensive renovations, would be shortened to Newport Grand after the closure of the fronton.

A two-year renovation of the building was completed in 2008 and aided in the ongoing effort to increase the number of slot machines there.

Newport rejects table games

Hurley and her staff campaigned among the city’s voters in 2012 to approve a referendum allowing expansion of Newport Grand into a full casino by offering table games like blackjack.

There had been previous attempts to open a full-fledged casino in Rhode Island. For example, in 2006, 63 percent of the state’s voters rejected a proposal by Harrah’s Entertainment and the Narragansett tribe to build a casino in West Warwick. That proposal was defeated by a 73 to 27 percent margin in Newport County.

More than 40 years ago, there had been a petition to open a casino in the Miramar mansion on Bellevue Avenue in Newport that was quickly squashed. The City Council in March 1977, by a vote of 5-2, rejected putting the Miramar proposal on the ballot as a referendum question.

The next gambling proposal came in 1980, when Leonard R. Sousa, then of Somerset, Massachusetts, and William Lucianelli, then of Taunton, Massachusetts, proposed building a $200 million to $300 million casino on Goat Island. It became a citywide referendum question.

Citizens Concerned About Casino Gambling established headquarters on Long Wharf that year and campaigned hard against the proposal. It was rejected in November 1980 by 85 percent of the voters.

There were two referenda concerning full casinos on the state ballot in 2012. Although allowing expansion at Newport Grand and Twin River in Lincoln was approved statewide, Newport voters rejected the plan on a 54 percent to 46 percent vote. For the expansion plans to move forward, voters in the host communities of the casinos had to approve the ballot question. Lincoln voters gave Twin River the go-ahead.

A proposal from a triumvirate of developers to spend $40 million to turn Newport Grand into a “Monte Carlo-style” casino led to a second statewide referendum question in 2014.

Real estate developer and former Providence mayor Joseph Paolino, British entrepreneur Peter de Savary and hotelier Paul G. Roiff had signed an agreement to buy Newport Grand from Hurley — contingent upon Newport voters approving the addition of table games. But city voters again said no, this time by 57 percent to 43 percent, again nullifying the approval granted by voters statewide.

Twin River Worldwide Holdings announced in early 2015 that it had a deal with Hurley to buy Newport Grand, contingent upon receiving regulatory approvals and clearing up title questions about the property.

Before the purchase was finalized in July 2015, the Twin River parent company announced in April plans to build a new casino in Tiverton near the Massachusetts border, transfer the Newport Grand license there, and add table games to its offerings. An 84-room hotel also would be built on the 45-acre parcel at William S. Canning Boulevard and Stafford Road.

The Tiverton Town Council voted 6-1 in November 2015 to ask the General Assembly to put the question on both the statewide and local ballots for November 2016. The plan was approved by voters both statewide and in Tiverton — in the town by less than 400 votes — thus opening up the Newport Grand site for a new phase of development.