Casinos in Manhattan, Santos in Washington
Gambling companies competing to build a casino in Manhattan, one of the industry’s most coveted untapped markets, face skepticism from officials who would need to approve projects in the heart of the city, I wrote last week with Katherine Sayre in The Wall Street Journal. (Click to read the article)
Real-estate and casino developers are pitching several sites in midtown Manhattan, including on the top floors of the Saks Fifth Avenue across from Rockefeller Center and in the very heart of Times Square. It’s vital to be near the city center to draw the right mix of tourists and wealthy clients, they said.
“New York City, for a whole host of obvious reasons, is the single-most important, unclaimed prize in gaming,” said Michael Pollock, managing director of Spectrum Gaming Group, a gambling research firm that issued a report on the New York market for state leaders. “Because of its New York City brand, because of its population, its disposable income, its existing tourism infrastructure.”
State and local officials who represent midtown Manhattan have been openly skeptical about casinos, though they haven’t shut the door entirely. Construction of housing is a more pressing concern in a part of the city where the median monthly rent now exceeds $4,000.
“There’s going to be an uphill road for any site in Manhattan,” said Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, a Democrat.
SANTOS IN DC: Embattled Rep. George Santos returned from a congressional break saying he was determined to do serious work as a Republican representative of New York state. But his week back in the Capitol shows that even if he is secure in his seat for now, he has made little progress in winning over his many colleagues who believe his history of false claims makes him unfit to be in office, to say nothing of the probes by state and federal investigators.
Natalie Andrews and I wrote this article about Santos’s sideshow status on Capitol Hill. The congressman got spoofed last week on late-night TV, including by comedian Jon Lovitz on “The Tonight Show.” I interviewed Lovitz about Santos — because why not?
Lovitz—whose recurring character on “Saturday Night Live” in the 1980s was a pathological liar—said he was offended by Santos’s claims that the congressman was Jewish and that his family fled Europe due to the Holocaust. Researchers have said there is no evidence that members of Santos’s family were Jewish or that they fled the Holocaust, and he has been disavowed by the Republican Jewish Coalition.
“The ironic thing about pathological liars is, they think that they’re fooling everybody,” Lovitz told me. “He should be embarrassed.”
THE QUESTION: What is the name of Jon Lovitz’s character on the 1990s animated comedy “The Critic?”
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: The two governors who have appointed all seven Court of Appeals judges are Mario and Andrew Cuomo. (Andrew is Mario’s kid.)