Tens of billions of dollars, thousands of jobs, and quite possibly the fate of New York’s most iconic industry and most awful tourist trap were all at stake. But the closing days of a yearslong fight over whether to build a casino in Times Square seemed to revolve around one man: Jay-Z.
You could see it over the summer, when Al Sharpton headlined a rally just south of Times Square’s iconic red steps. “Say yes time! Yes time! In Times Square! Times Square! Jay-Z! Jay-Z!” he shouted. You could see it last week at the Broadhurst Theatre on 44th Street, the site of a final public hearing on the casino before a do-or-die vote. “For the first time,” promised Marc Holliday, the CEO of the city’s largest commercial real estate firm, “everyone has a seat at this table, with Jay-Z at the head.”
HOV, through his entertainment firm, Roc Nation, poured “hundreds of millions” into a stake in the project, according to its CEO, Desiree Perez. Then Roc Nation joined Holliday’s company, SL Green, and Caesars Entertainment in spending millions and millions more promoting it to sometimes-wary lawmakers, municipal bureaucrats, and the public at large. The goal: secure one of three licenses for casinos in the New York City area.
On Wednesday, everything fell apart. Before a bid could even be considered by the state’s regulators, it had to capture four of six votes from a community advisory committee, all appointed by local politicians. That vote finally happened after years of buildup, and the committee decisively rejected the bid—four to two against Jay-Z’s big play in Times Square. Despite support from the mayor and the governor of New York, the Times Square casino is dead.
It’s a massive loss for all of the partners in the Times Square casino project—including its most famous one, whose up-from-nothing, keep-close-to-the-streets story was at the center of the closing argument. “We from these neighborhoods,” Jay-Z told the advisory committee members as they sat across a conference table over the summer. “We hear a lot of talk about community. We are the community.”
“We’re not saying, ‘Give it to us because we happen to be Black, Hispanic, and female,’” Perez tells me, right before the big vote. “No, that’s not what we’re saying. Of course not. But we are saying, ‘Don’t ignore who we are, what we stand for, where we come from, where we’ve been, everything that we’ve accomplished. Please don’t ignore that.’”
And as for the forces opposing the casino? The theater types, who worry that tourists might gamble away their Broadway money? Or that a casino might poison Broadway’s delicate ecosystem? Create traffic armageddon in midtown? Well, to borrow a phrase from a different rapper: not like us. Jay-Z’s allies argued that opponents weren’t just a bunch of finger-wagging hall monitors standing in the way of thousands of Black and brown people getting casino jobs. They were, according to Sharpton, “oligarchs.” It was an ironic choice of words, given Jay-Z’s billionaire status.
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