Benjamin and Christina Schwarz provide an answer in 'Mississippi Monte Carlo,' a piece from The Atlantic's January 1996 issue: Which raises the question of why the casinos are there in the first place. These are Mississippi's flooded casinos.Ĭlustered in and around the town of Tunica, a short drive south of Memphis or north of Greenville, they're impossible to miss: glittering, often tacky buildings that materialized in cotton country, an area that is often referred to as the poorest place in the U.S. (To see some of these striking images, visit Alan Taylor's In Focus gallery.) But a few photos seem strange: the ones containing Hilton-like suburban palaces or King Arthur-style turrets. The buildings and other human structures can seem like afterthoughts, in part because they mostly look like what many people expect: small Southern houses, historic brick buildings, and the like. In most photos of the recent Mississippi floods, what you notice first is the water, the dramatic thick brown sheet.
