From Beyoncé And Baccarat To Kevin James And The Belt Parkway: A New York Story

In my not-quite Walter Mitty fantasies, I saw myself as a member of the working press covering the opening of Caesars Times Square. 

Of course, those “not-quite Walter Mitty fantasies” quickly gave way to actual Walter Mitty fantasies, and there I was — I live only an hour outside of New York — covering the event, when all of a sudden Jay-Z gives me a nod and I’m welcomed into the VIP section of Caesars Times Square, where now I’m sipping champagne with Beyonce and playing baccarat for $100,000 a hand, and by the time I leave the party, I’m wearing a tuxedo opened at the collar like George Clooney and I’ve also somehow morphed into George Clooney and then Brad Pitt and I grab a helicopter out to the Hamptons, where we’ll find a bar where the locals go and have a few beers while reminiscing about filming Ocean’s 11 and …

Nope.

There won’t be a Caesars Times Square. There won’t be any Manhattan casinos. There won’t be Beyonce. There won’t be helicopters. Heck, we’ll be lucky if we get Kevin James cutting a ribbon outside Resorts World Queens while the A train rumbles by.

I had high hopes and big dreams for the downstate casino licenses in New York, and I’m quite confident I wasn’t the only one. What started as a relatively exciting process (as government processes go) took entirely too long, and saw the more robust and less-regional options get demolished and destroyed.

Of course, we’re still not at the finish. Right now, as we live and breathe, the great New York Casino Race is less a full-throttle sprint to the finish line and more like a bunch of morning mall walkers shuffling past Cinnabon. 

Then there were three

So where are we, really? We’re down to the B-list, you ask me.

There’s Resorts World at Aqueduct, which would be a world-class gambling (and more) facility if built but is — and I can’t stress this enough — in Queens.

Then there’s New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s Citi Field bid, which would also probably be world class and would be eight miles from Resorts and, once again, located in Queens. 

Then you have Bally’s at Ferry Point in the Bronx, which is A) in the Bronx, and B) might, who knows, maybe, hard to say, probably best not to get into it, I don’t want to end up deported to El Salvador, let’s just pretend I never said anything about how President Trump might be pushing the chess pieces around on this one, and C) have I mentioned it’s in the Bronx?

Now you might think that I’m being hard on the outer boroughs here, and that’s because I’m being hard on the outer boroughs.

Listen: There are 27 million people that live within a 100-mile radius of New York City, present company included, and most of them would happily go into Manhattan for any number of reasons. The food, the nightlife, the shopping, Broadway, all of it.

But to go to Queens or the Bronx? Only if you’re going to a Mets game, a Yankees game, or to visit Aunt Gertie. That’s it. That’s the list. (Of course, I’m exaggerating. Aunt Gertie died in 2002.)

Big dreams

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Albany gave the green light, everyone got dollar signs in their eyes, and the press releases flowed like champagne at that Beyonce party I’m now not going to be invited to.

Developers lined up. Unions were ready. Local leaders started practicing their shoveling poses. But then came the zoning amendments. Then came the Community Advisory Committees (six politicians and one civic appointee per district, what could go wrong?). Then came the Q&A rounds, where applicants asked hundreds of questions, like “Can we actually build anything?” and the state politely responded, “We have no idea, stand by.”

Fast forward to now, and all that energy has melted away.

MGM Empire City — another slots parlor like Resorts World, and long considered an obvious choice to be able to expand — just walked away from the whole thing, deciding it wasn’t worth it. The Manhattan bids, along with all the others, got eaten alive by their own neighborhoods.

And that’s the shame of it, because this could’ve been huge. Huge. Huuuuuuge.

A casino in Manhattan would not have been just another gambling venue. It would have been a gravitational pull. You drop one in Times Square or Hudson Yards or even on top of Saks, and suddenly you have whales flying in from Dubai, conventioneers extending their stays, and finance bros leaving happy hour for some blackjack.

Instead, we’re getting something less than transformative. Not bad, just smaller. The kind of thing that’ll make headlines on … News12 (iykyk). These licenses were supposed to bring Vegas-level glitz to the city that supposedly never sleeps, and now we’re staring down a future where the New York casino experience involves the Belt Parkway and the Cross Bronx.

Still, who knows. Maybe one of these Queens or Bronx properties surprises us. Maybe Cohen builds a mini–Epcot of gambling next to Citi Field. Maybe Bally’s manages to make the Bronx a destination for something other than the Yankees. It’s New York, after all. Stranger things have happened. 

But it’s hard not to feel like the big dream, the one where the heart of Manhattan pulsed with casino neon, got folded before the cards were even dealt.

I also still look nothing like George Clooney. Nothing. Not even a whisper.