Northfield Park prepares for transformation from horse racing track to Hard Rock Casino

NORTHFIELD, Ohio - While the opening next month of Cleveland’s Horseshoe Casino promises to have a big impact on the city’s downtown, the plans just announced for Northfield Park in the Village of Northfield promise to be equally as impressive for this northern Summit County community.

The harness racing track is partnering with Hard Rock Entertainment on $275 million gaming and entertaining center.

"This means a thousand jobs to us, this means a tourist town to us, this means just a huge economic boost to Northfield Village," said Mayor Jesse Nehez.

The slots only casino allowed under an agreement with the state reached last year by the owners of the four full gaming casinos Rock Gaming and Penn National, that cleared the way for video lottery terminals, or VLTs, at the state’s seven horse racing tracks.

Northfield is owned by Milstein Entertainment, CEO Brock Milstein said they considered operating the casino on their own.

“We did, we've talked about doing it alone but at the end of the day why do it alone when you can partner with a company that has the expertise and the brand that the Hard Rock has.”

The roughly 150,000 to 200,000 square foot facility will be built on property adjacent to the existing grandstand and will capitalize Milstein said on what Hard Rock does best.

"The Hard Rock is known for entertainment so we anticipate that music, all types of music and different types of entertainment will be an integral part of what we do going forward,” he said.

Just last month, the state cleared the way for Penn National to move two of its horse racing tracks away from their two casinos in Columbus and Toledo to Youngstown and Dayton respectively for the additional fee of $75 million per property on top of the $50 million licensing fee.

Caesars, owner of Thistledown is looking at moving the North Randall track to the Akron Canton area for the same reason.

Milstein says they looked at the possibility of relocation but only briefly. “It has been talked about but its not anything that we had seriously considered.”

More details are expected to be revealed for the project next week but Milstein says their master plan for the 115 acre site includes eventual plans for a hotel “but it’s not something that we’re going to do in phase one,” he said.

The track shares a property line with Ford’s Walton Hills stamping plant which is in the process of phasing out operations, Milstein says they’ve considered some possibilities.

“We've talked with Ford about different ideas but they're still operating the plant and that's kind of a longer term story,” said Milstein. “The biggest thing is we have plenty of room here we've got about 115 acres and we can develop about half of it for the gaming entertainment venue. So we can do everything we need to do on our existing site.”

Northfield and Hard Rock are going forward regardless of what Caesars and their partner Rock Gaming plan to do with Thistledown. In addition they believe there’s more than enough gambling dollars to peacefully and profitably coexist with the downtown Horseshoe Casino.

"We feel that we're going to serve two separate submarkets in Northeast Ohio and all of the studies that have been done show that there is more than enough room in the area for both of us,” Milstein said.