By Kevin Haas
Rock River Current
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ROCKFORD — Years before the first bets were placed Thursday at the new Hard Rock Casino Rockford, Dan Fischer and a team of investors made a bet of their own.
The group invested millions of dollars to buy and tear down the former Clock Tower Resort in hopes the state would eventually approve legislation to allow for a Rockford casino. Lawmakers did so in 2019, two years after the group’s $3.6 million land buy.
“You had to restore it back to a grass condition and wait for potential legislation to come down the road — it was kind of a bet to do that,” Fischer said Thursday during a kick-off celebration.
City and state officials said the bet paid off Thursday, as hundreds of people lined up in sweltering heat to be among the first guests to the new 175,000-square-foot casino and entertainment venue at 7801 E. State St. near Interstate 90.
“The pursuit of this project went over 12 years,” said Fischer, the chief investor in 815 Entertainment, the group that brought Hard Rock to town. “Our team, our investors are local: 90% of our investment group is local roots, private capital, no private equity. So when you look at this place it was built with people who put in real money from a local perspective, and made a big bet on Rockford.”
The long-awaited opening of the roughly $365 million venue was marked with an extravagant Las Vegas-style celebration with pyrotechnics, aerial acrobats, musical performances and dancing.
“One thing we’re really good at as a company: We know how to throw a grand-opening party,” said Hard Rock International COO John Lucas.
Chicago Blackhawks national anthem singer Jim Cornelison kicked off the event with the singing of the national anthem, and retired Major General John Borling led a tribute to 10 World War II veterans who were all more than 100 years old.
The event concluded with Hard Rock’s signature guitar smash, which is its version of a ribbon-cutting in which local dignitaries and celebrities raised more than a dozen prop guitars above their heads and smashed them over guitar necks.
Among Hard Rock’s guitar-smashing guests were Maybelle Blair, who is a former All-American Girls Professional Baseball League player working to help bring the International Women’s Baseball Center to the home of the Rockford Peaches, and NBA star and Auburn High School alum Fred VanVleet.
“It’s good to see the city continue to grow and you have to tip your cap and give credit to all the incredible people who are putting the work in behind the scenes to make things like this happen,” VanVleet said. “I think we should be incredibly grateful and proud that we’re able to land something like this. I think this will help generations to come.”
Also helping kick things off was, of course, Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen. Nielsen, who was an early partner with Fischer and Ringland-Johnson CEO Brent Johnson on the casino project, now has a nearly 63-foot tall replica of one of his signature checkerboard guitars standing out front of the casino. There are also dozens of pieces of Nielsen’s memorabilia from guitars to custom outfits on display in the casino.
“That’s an iconic landmark that will live on forever in Rockford and show your contribution not only to Rockford, to music but all the wonderful things you and your family do,” Fischer said to Nielsen at the event. “It’s a true model of how families should be.”
Others in attendance included Gov. JB Pritzker, who touted how Hard Rock will add to the state’s increasing tourism numbers, members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida Council, Winnebago County Board Chairman Joe Chiarelli, Mayor Tom McNamara, and several state lawmakers and other local dignitaries.
McNamara, Pritzker, Chiarelli and others doled out dozens of thank-you messages to investors, regulatory workers, a variety of supporters and the union trades workers who built the casino.
Johnson, whose company led construction, said it was a massive undertaking that required near round-the-clock work.
“Where you’re standing now was 25 feet below us, and the volume of that crushed stone or grave would fill residential pools over 500,000 times,” Johnson said inside the Hard Rock Live, a 1,600-seat entertainment venue. “The amount of wire to operate these lights would take us to Chicago and halfway back again — 140 miles of wire in this building.”
People wrapped around the building waiting for the doors to open with long lines still filtering in more than an hour after the grand opening.
“The air conditioning is great,” Rachel Schroeder of Beloit, Wisconsin, joked once inside the new casino. “We were waiting outside for an hour and it was hot.”
She said she was eager to check out the new offerings and try to win some money.
“I was looking forward to just seeing the opening of the casino, playing all the new games and having a good time,” Schroeder said. “It’s gorgeous. Everything looks fantastic.”
Hard Rock Casino Rockford presented $150,000 to the Rockford Park District as a gift to celebrate the opening. An additional $17,000 was raised for Vets Roll, a nonprofit that helps veterans visit important war memorials. That money was raised through an auction for a spot to smash one of the guitars.
Going forward, the city is guaranteed $7 million annually in gambling tax revenue from Hard Rock Casino. If Hard Rock’s revenue projections fall short, it must make up the difference to ensure the city receives its guaranteed funding.
Winnebago County also received 20% of the gambling tax revenue while Loves Park and Machesney Park each get a 5% share.
So far, the city has invested about $1.5 million annually of gambling revenue into Rockford Promise, which provided qualified Rockford Public Schools graduates with full tuition scholarships to Northern Illinois University and Rockford University.
McNamara said he’ll share plans for the additional revenue with City Council members in the coming weeks. Those uses, he said, will include investing in infrastructure, community safety, support for distressed neighborhoods and strengthening the city’s fiscal footing.
“We will continue to make positive change with the revenue we get from this casino, because we want the impact to be long lasting on the lives of every single person in Rockford,” McNamara said.
McNamara said the casino has been a project roughly 30 years in the making for Rockford. He said it shows Rockford is no longer a community of what-ifs and missed opportunities, but one that gets things done.
“Today we are celebrating the opening of this casino, but to me we’re also celebrating the growth and success of Rockford,” McNamara said. “We no longer, folks, are the community of what-ifs or could’ve, would’ve … We are a community that is on the rise.”
This article is by Kevin Haas. Email him at khaas@rockrivercurrent.com or follow him on X at @KevinMHaas or Instagram @thekevinhaas and Threads @thekevinhaas