The building that once served up deep-dish pizza and pitchers of beer on Cheyenne's Meadowland Drive is getting a new purpose: taking bets. Bally's Corporation will operate a gaming center at 1734 Meadowland Drive, the former home of Old Chicago, offering off-track betting and historic horse racing machines to Wyoming gamblers. The city cleared the way for the project Monday night with barely a discussion.
The Cheyenne City Council approved a simulcasting permit and a special-use permit for Bally's Corporation, according to Cap City News. Both permits moved through the council's consent agenda, the mechanism the city uses to pass routine or uncontroversial items in bulk rather than debating them individually. Bally's permit application indicates the facility will generally keep the existing layout of the defunct Old Chicago restaurant and its parking lot, and the company plans to plant trees along the property's eastern flank to protect the view for nearby apartment residents.
Off-track betting lets gamblers wager on races happening at tracks elsewhere, while historic horse racing machines allow players to bet on races that already happened, with the horse names and race dates encrypted so the outcome isn't known in advance. The Cheyenne gaming center is expected to employ around 10 workers, per the same report. Bally's is described in that reporting as a nationwide gambling company now expanding into north Cheyenne.
A Bigger Wyoming Betting Footprint
The Meadowland Drive location is part of a larger set of approvals. A proposed transfer of Cowboy Racing's wagering approvals to Bally's Wyoming, reported by Cap City News earlier this year, covered pari-mutuel wagering on live horse racing, historic horse racing and simulcast events at three Cheyenne addresses: 1720 Cleveland Ave., 1734 Meadowland Drive and 714 W. 20th St. Bally's has also taken majority ownership of the Thunder Plains racetrack, planned as Wyoming's first full, 1-mile track roughly 10 miles east of Cheyenne, according to Cowboy State Daily.
Cowboy State Daily reports that Bally's envisions purses of $100,000 per day for a 16-day season at Thunder Plains, totaling $1.6 million, and that the company wants to link the new track with existing Wyoming horse-racing events into one continuous regional circuit. Thunder Plains itself has said its Cheyenne off-track betting locations would begin opening in the second quarter, with official dates still to be announced. Live racing at the track, however, has been pushed back: Wyoming News reports the inaugural live horse racing meet at Bally's Cheyenne Park, previously scheduled for October, will now take place in 2027.
Why Wyoming Keeps Betting on Historic Racing
Historic horse racing has become a real moneymaker for Wyoming's cities and counties. Machines were approved for operation at 46 locations statewide as of May, and cities and counties saw about $24.9 million in revenue from the machines last year, according to Wyoming Public Media. About $2.8 million of that flowed into the state's School Foundation Program Account, while Laramie County pulled in nearly $4 million and the city of Cheyenne received roughly $3.6 million, the outlet reported.
Players statewide received more than $2 billion in payouts from the machines last year, and the Wyoming Gaming Commission approved 72 live horse racing days this year, up from 54 the year before, per the same report. The industry hasn't been without legal turbulence, though: a July 2025 court conclusion, described in a Wyoming Legislative Service Office document, found that the Wyoming Pari-Mutuel Commission lacked statutory authority to approve instant-racing terminals and that such devices fell within the state's definition of illegal gambling devices under W.S. 6-7-101(a)(iv).
Other Business at Monday's Meeting
Bally's permits were just two items among many the council approved in bulk Monday night. The council signed off on $88,410 for in-car camera systems for new police cars, $207,665 for Consolidated Resources LLC to haul compost for the city, $86,918 for a new special operations SUV for Cheyenne Fire Rescue, and $102,098 for a new forestry chipper dump truck. Council members also approved a $302,862 subrecipient agreement with the Wyoming Department of Transportation to fund the Cheyenne Transit Program and renewed leases for the Putt Hutt in Lions Park and the Cheyenne Depot Museum downtown.
Several other proposals were referred to committee rather than approved outright, including a plan to reappropriate $250,000 from general fund reserves for airport golf course cart path repairs, a contract to design the new Johnson Pool, an MOU for impact assistance funds tied to the Cheyenne Prairie Generating Station expansion project, and a redesign of the municipal building parking lot. Those referred items are expected to come back before the council for approval in the coming weeks.
