New York — The last roll of the dice for a Manhattan casino is over. After months of pitched hearings and furious lobbying, a state-chartered Community Advisory Committee voted to block Freedom Plaza, an East Midtown resort that would have planted a gaming floor and glassy towers near the United Nations. With that decision, every active bid in the borough is now dead, and New York City’s high-stakes contest for up to three downstate casino licenses shifts decisively to the outer boroughs and the suburbs. For the record of decision and initial coverage, see the Manhattan casino proposal rejected.
The Freedom Plaza defeat capped a bruising week in which committees also rejected a Times Square partnership led by SL Green and Caesars, and a Far West Side concept branded the Avenir from Silverstein Properties. The cascade of losses ended Manhattan’s aspirational run at gaming’s richest license and hardened a political lesson. In this process, local signoff is not a procedural hoop, it is the hinge. A succinct national wrap can be found in the Associated Press note that there will be no casino in Manhattan after all proposals were rejected by locals, which also records the sequence and vote margins. According to Associated Press, that No casino in Manhattan after panel rejects Freedom Plaza. For our own previous reporting on the earlier defeats, see The Eastern Herald’s analysis of the Times Square and Avenir casino projects.
Freedom Plaza was pitched as a sweeping, more-than-$10-billion neighborhood remake on the East River between East 38th and East 41st Streets, with a museum, hotels, a wellness complex, new parks and a residential program that the developers said would bankroll itself through gaming revenue. As noted by Gothamist in a last-ditch attempt to ease community objections, the sponsors said over the weekend that all 1,080 proposed apartments would be designated affordable, an offer acknowledged by local outlets but not enough to change the outcome. Community panel squashes Freedom Plaza.
When the six-member committee convened, the vote was quick and decisive, four to two against, according to broadcast and local reports. ABC7’s live hit framed it as the third 4-2 rejection in less than a week, which matches what we heard from attendees and the sponsors themselves. East Side casino proposal rejected 4-2. For a granular readout on the Avenir’s separate defeat, including a request to delay the vote that was denied, According to CBS New York’s brief is worth a look.
The Times Square bid leaned on the district’s entertainment DNA, promising to retrofit 1515 Broadway and attach a thick package of public benefits. Celebrity advocates staged for the cameras, but committee members were unmoved. The official portal for the Caesars Palace Times Square committee confirms the 4-2 tally recorded on September 17. As NYCasino Noted that, The Times Square Community Advisory Committee vote. Separate trade and local coverage documented how the campaign recruited star power and pledged hundreds of millions in sweeteners, a sign of how intensely the tourism district courted and resisted the idea at the same time.
What the week really underscored is process. New York designed this competition so that no application can advance to the state’s Gaming Facility Location Board without clearing a pair of hurdles: successful completion of local entitlements and a yes vote from a Community Advisory Committee. The state’s own primer spells that out, including the current deadlines for zoning and environmental review by September 30, 2025. According to NYCasino, that Required approvals and Community Advisory Committees. That structure gives neighborhoods real leverage at the front end. In Manhattan, they used it.
Developers and labor leaders will argue that the committees left jobs and tax receipts on the table. They may be right about the scale. A Manhattan license would likely have been among the most valuable gaming concessions in the country, combining daily tourist flows with high-income locals and global brand visibility. Bloomberg and others have clocked the money in the fight and the speed at which top-tier operators shaped bids for Midtown. City Hall even commissioned a broad accounting of gaming’s potential benefits earlier this month, with Mayor Eric Adams touting billions in economic impact while conceding that distribution and neighborhood concerns have to be managed.
Opponents countered with a simpler case. Times Square, Midtown East and Hudson Yards are already congested, already sensitive, and in their view ill-suited to an industry that runs around the clock. Resident groups questioned whether a gaming floor would cannibalize spending from restaurants and theaters rather than creating new demand. Broadway stakeholders split, but many saw more risk than reward. These doubts were not moralizing about gambling so much as an urban policy critique. A casino is not a museum or a park. It is an anchor tenant that reshapes streets and transit patterns at odd hours, and it requires bespoke policing and sanitation that Midtown agencies are already stretched to provide.
Even if you buy the tax math, the political math was unforgiving. Legislative appointees and community voices coalesced early against gaming in the borough. Sponsors tried to rework housing mixes, emphasize union jobs and fund waterfront amenities, but the endpoints did not change. The riverfront, in particular, became a symbol of the dilemma. Freedom Plaza’s backers said the casino would pay for esplanades and open space along the East River, tying neighborhoods to the water after decades of separation. Detractors feared the inverse, that public benefits would be a fig leaf for a private facility whose traffic and policing needs would dominate a fragile corridor. Architectural and urbanism outlets captured that tension, including 6sqft’s New York city, vote and who backed it, Freedom Plaza will not move forward.
Across town, the Avenir’s pitch ran into a different narrative. Critics saw yet another bespoke carve-out for a master-planned district already swimming in subsidies and special rules. Supporters said the complex could bind together the next tranche of cultural space and retail on the Far West Side, a complement rather than a competitor to existing venues. The committee did not buy it. Nor did the Times Square panel, where the argument that a casino would stabilize public order by funding security and sanitation landed awkwardly with those who have been pushing the city for years to fix the basics without gaming strings attached.
Manhattan’s exit simplifies the bracket, and it scrambles it. The outer boroughs and the suburbs are now the core of the fight. Bidders near Citi Field in Queens, on Coney Island in Brooklyn, and at the Throgs Neck site in the Bronx have their own committees to clear. The two racetrack casinos, Resorts World at Aqueduct in Queens and MGM’s Empire City in Yonkers, will keep pressing their case that upgrades are the fastest path to revenue because they can spin up table games without the land-use wars.
The timeline is tight. Applicants must finish zoning and environmental signoffs by September 30, 2025, then secure the committee approvals that unlock a full state review. Albany’s decision window, according to AP, sits at the end of the year, which means several bids will live or die on logistics rather than theater. Community boards in Midtown posted clear notices that committees needed complete records with time to review, a small procedural point that became significant when sponsors sought late changes. The CB5 note on public comment illustrates how little slack there was in the calendar.
Zoom out and the policy debate is almost boring in its familiarity. Let private megaprojects fund the public realm, the pitch goes, and your city gets new parks and cultural space without raising taxes. The counterargument says the price is too high, because single-use anchors capture benefits and convert public agencies into bespoke service providers. Casinos sharpen that argument because their economics are both narrow and lucrative. They rely on frequent visits from a stable base of players, which alters how neighborhoods function after dark, how subways and streets are policed, who is on the sidewalks at 2 a.m. and why.
There is also a national context that Manhattan’s committees probably understood. The United States is witnessing a sustained expansion of iGaming and regional casinos that do not depend on megaprojects in the urban core. The Eastern Herald has reported on the sector’s acceleration, including a spring milestone when US online casino revenue hit a record in March 2025. Our own research library has parsed the economic impact of casino expansion, from jobs and tourism to the costs of oversaturation and the shift to digital play. The point is not that a Manhattan casino was doomed by national trends, rather that the opportunity cost now runs in both directions. New York can capture some revenues by upgrading existing properties faster and with less risk, but it may forego the marquee tourism draw that a Midtown license would have delivered.
The politics remain awkward for City Hall and the Governor’s office. Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul have signaled openness to casinos as part of a jobs-first recovery strategy, and appointees aligned with them voted yes on at least one bid. Neither led a public crusade for a Midtown gambling floor, which tells you how potent the local backlash is. The committees’ decisions now give them safe cover to pivot, praising the process in Manhattan while championing bids in places that have organized in favor of them. If outer-borough projects clear their own committees, expect Adams to argue that gaming revenues should be shared equitably across all five boroughs, not locked to the neighborhood where a facility sits. His office has already previewed that line.
Developers will now regroup. For the Soloviev site on the East River, the choices are stark. They can try to reintroduce a mixed-use plan without gaming revenue, or they can sell. Either way, they will be asking neighbors who just rejected their centerpiece to trust them on a different promise. For Times Square and Hudson Yards, the calculus is simpler. Those districts do not need a casino to command investor attention. They will continue to attract capital without committing to an industry that many residents and theater workers see as out of sync with the blocks they are trying to stabilize.
Manhattan’s committees did not say no to tourism or entertainment. They said no to a single anchor use that would dominate the blocks around it. The borough will keep leveraging smaller, distributed bets, the sort that stitch together theaters, restaurants, galleries and pop-up attractions and spread risk across many actors. A casino concentrates both risk and return. This week, the city chose diffusion.
That does not make the fiscal questions go away. New York’s tax base still needs recurring revenue and its neighborhoods still need careful, participatory planning. Those goals are not mutually exclusive, but they collide when speed and scale become the only selling points. The outer-borough bids will have to show their committees how they plan to manage traffic, transit and policing in ways that Midtown applicants could not. They will also need to demonstrate that revenues will be shared beyond their boundaries, a political imperative in a city that sees itself as a single organism when it comes to services, and a collection of fiercely defended blocks when it comes to land use.
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For readers comparing regional models, Michigan’s ecosystem shows how state-level operators weave gaming into a broader hospitality strategy that local communities can live with. Our recent feature on that is here: Michigan casino experiences rank among the top five states. It is not a blueprint for New York, but it is a reminder that design, scale and community alignment matter as much as revenue forecasts, and that committees with power tend to use it.
What happens next will play out in hearings and spreadsheets, not ribbon cuttings. Applicants outside Manhattan will race to finish their entitlements before the September 30 deadline, the Community Advisory Committees will publish their calendars, and Albany will weigh the narrowed field. If the state keeps its schedule, final license decisions are expected in December, a year-end punctuation mark on a saga that has been as much about who decides as what gets built. For a clean ledger of the state’s process and statutory criteria, the New York gaming portal is the authoritative record.
