Good morning. It is Wednesday. We will look at the opportunities for casinos in Manhattan. We also take a look at how the nearly extinct American chestnut tree is making a comeback in a city park.
The odds are even better than that by the end of the week, New York State will authorize three casino licenses for the New York City area.
Government Kathy Hochul is pushing for a provision in the state budget that would speed up licensing. Some lawmakers dream of a game with no limits, or almost – certainly a revenue windfall for the state. And casino companies aren’t the only ones drooling. So are real estate developers, hoping for a big payoff after the difficult years of the pandemic.
Mayor Eric Adams wants to sit at the hot table. He’d like New York City to get two of the three licenses, his spokesman said, and not for the second to go elsewhere, like Long Island. Frank Carone, Adams’ chief of staff, recently met with Robert Goldstein, the director of Las Vegas Sands, at Goldstein’s pied-à-terre on the Upper East Side.
For now, the action is in Albany, where the high rollers are seven gambling companies spending over $300,000 a month on a lobbying blitz.
They have coordinated with the influential union that represents hotel workers, which called itself the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council last year and whose president describes casino licensing as the top priority in Albany. The union says new casinos in and around New York City would mean jobs for thousands of hotel workers who were laid off as the pandemic decimated tourism.
The ties between the casino companies and the union are so close that in a number of cases the union shares lobbyists with casino companies. Peter Ward, the union’s former chairman, lobbies for both Genting, the union’s largest employer, and Bally. He is a registered lobbyist for the union.
Resorts World has invested in a public relations campaign – New Yorkers for Responsible Gaming – highlighting how casinos would benefit hotel staff. It is run by Neal Kwatra, a political adviser who also works for the union. The union has put a lot of money on the table: It has sent at least $880,000 in campaign contributions to Democrats in Albany since 2020, according to campaign reports.
The licenses were set forth in a constitutional amendment that voters approved in 2013: seven licenses, the first four of which go to racetracks in the state. The three downstate licenses could not be issued until 2023.
State senator Joseph Addabbo Jr., a Democrat and chairman of the casino overseeing committee, said granting two of the licenses to MGM and Genting “is probably the most popular scenario, where nothing is taken for granted, because it is an open process.” should be. .” Genting’s Resorts World Casino is located in its neighbourhood.
Competition for what’s seen as the third unclaimed license has sparked a lobbying frenzy, with fields ranging from a casino next to the Water Club on the East River to what state senator Liz Krueger described as, “an upscale Monaco-esque casino.” on the top floor of Saks.” A spokeswoman for Saks declined to comment.
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It is one of the best-known lines in American poetry: “Under the spreading chestnut tree / The village smithy stands.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s beloved blacksmiths eventually died out, victims of mass production. This also applied to chestnut trees, victims of a plague.
But now chestnut trees are making a comeback. About 300 chestnut trees, crossed to resist the fungus that started killing their ancestors when Theodore Roosevelt was president, have been planted in an Upper Manhattan park.
So far, so good, said Jason Smith, the Northern Manhattan Parks director for the New York Restoration Project, which planted the trees five years ago with the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. The larger ones are already over 18 feet high and have a long way to go — American chestnuts once climbed more than 30 feet and dominated forests in the eastern United States. “They’re not redwoods,” he said, “but old black-and-white photos are incredibly dramatic — little people standing in front of the giants of the forest.”
Like oysters, they played a role in New York City’s history and economy, he said. Long before Bob Wells and Mel Torme wrote “The Christmas Song,” there were chestnut carts on street corners, with the line “roast chestnuts on an open fire.” Smith said he had never tasted an American chestnut. “As far as I understand,” he said, “European chestnuts aren’t that good, and that’s what we have now.”
The fungus that nearly destroyed the American chestnut was discovered in the early 1900s after trees at the Bronx Zoo began to die. Researchers eventually determined that the fungus had arrived on imported Japanese trees years earlier. The Forest Service considers American chestnuts functionally extinct because chestnut stems sprout from old underground roots before dying from the fungus — a cycle that repeats year after year.
The 300 new chestnut trees occupy a three-acre site in Highbridge Park, which Smith said his group had worked on clearing, weeding invasive vines and clearing abandoned cars and loads of junk. “The big advantage was that you can plant trees in a degraded area, and they will still do very well,” he said.
The trees are American-Chinese hybrids developed by the American Chestnut Foundation, a non-profit organization that uses traditional breeding methods to generate trees with the mildew resistance of Chinese chestnuts and the vigor of the native American species. It’s a different approach than the parks department usually takes on habitat restoration projects, but a spokeswoman said “hybridization is the only known way to get this historically significant tree into our forests.”
Sara Fern Fitzsimmons, the foundation’s director of restoration and research technologist at Penn State University, said Highbridge Park was “the perfect setting” for the project.
Smith said it was no surprise that the trees grew beautifully. “It’s that this can be done by a neighborhood green group that works with local kids,” he said. “That can raise expectations about what a New York City forest can contribute.”
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METROPOLITAN diary
Fishing
Dear Diary:
My husband came home from lunch very exhausted. One of his earplugs had jumped on the way home, crashed into a pile of leaves and fell through a sewer grate.
When he looked down, he could see it resting on some leaves below. Thinking he might be able to fish it out, he wrapped a long cord around a flashlight with a magnetic handle. He could lift it as high as the sewer grate, which was too narrow to get through.
He had to go to a meeting, so he had to give up. I decided to give it a try before the sun went down.
Armed with a small but powerful magnet tied to a long cord, I looked through the grille, saw the earbuds, and tried my luck. I too managed to get it on the magnet, but I couldn’t get it through the grid either and it fell back down.
“Looking for something?” I heard a man say.
I turned around and saw two construction workers standing there. I told them what I was fishing for. One of them removed the grille, asked for the magnet, and pulled up the earbud effortlessly. Then he put the grill back on and they walked away.
— Miriam K. Tierney
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here†
