"I'm really, really depending on it, because now I'm doing nothing," he said. "Everybody's telling me this is going to bring me a lot of business. It's the only Jamaican food in the area."
Burchell is one of many small-business owners in Chester who are anxiously waiting, with varying degrees of expectation, to see how the soccer stadium will affect their bottom line.
Bob Ginn, owner of Ginn's Restaurant and Bar - "Coldest beer in the city," he says - doesn't expect a big payday, at least not until chains and retail outlets that visitors are familiar with start popping up along Route 291, which runs parallel to the Delaware River. But he'll be pedaling slabs of BBQ ribs and bushels of fresh crabs to tailgaters as they drive by his adjoining crab shack en route to the stadium.
"They're not going to really hang around the city too long," Ginn, 77, predicted. "At least, not until it gets better."
In itself, a sports stadium isn't going to fix Chester, a fiscally distressed city whose population dropped by half following World War II. Today, Chester is in a "state of emergency" due to a recent spate of homicides, including that of a 2-year-old boy who was shot in the head this month. In five sections of the city, an all-ages nighttime curfew is in effect.
"You don't find any examples where a stadium has kick-started an economy or rejuvenated an area," said Rick Eckstein, a Villanova sociology professor and co-author of "Public Dollars, Private Stadiums: The Battle Over Building Sports Stadiums."
"The rhetoric dies hard," he said.
But the $122 million stadium is only one part of Chester's long-term revitalization strategy, said David Sciocchetti, executive director of the Chester Economic Development Authority.
