New York Picked Its Three Casinos. None Is in Manhattan, and One Is Already Dealing Cards.
All three Manhattan bids died in community votes. The licenses went to two sites in Queens and one in the Bronx, and Resorts World started dealing live blackjack on April 28, 2026.
Rewritten September 21, 2026. The version of this post published in March named a Hard Rock in Times Square and a Resorts World in Manhattan, and said the licenses would be awarded in 2026. All three were wrong. The Times Square bid was Caesars', Resorts World bid for its existing site in Queens, and the licenses were awarded in December 2025.
The first live blackjack table in New York City history opened on April 28, 2026, and it is not in Manhattan. It is at Resorts World New York City, the old racino at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, which had been running electronic machines only since it opened.
The three downstate casino licenses that New York spent years promoting went to two sites in Queens and one in the Bronx. Every Manhattan proposal was voted down before the state ever looked at it.
How the bids fell away
Each proposal had to get through a six-member community advisory committee before the state's siting board would consider it, and it needed two-thirds of that committee to pass. Manhattan's bids did not get there.
On September 17, 2025, the committee for Caesars Palace Times Square, the bid from SL Green, Caesars and Jay-Z's Roc Nation, voted it down 4 to 2. Avenir, a Silverstein Properties plan on the West Side, lost by the same margin the same day. On September 23 the Freedom Plaza bid near the United Nations failed 4 to 2 as well. That ended Manhattan.
Four proposals came through the committee stage: Bally's Bronx, Metropolitan Park in Queens, Resorts World New York City, and MGM's plan to turn Empire City in Yonkers into a full casino. Then on October 14, 2025, MGM withdrew. Its reasons were the four bids clustered close together, which cut into the returns it expected, and new state guidance that it would get a 15-year license rather than the 30-year term its plan assumed.
That left three bids for three licenses. The Gaming Facility Location Board voted unanimously for all three on December 1, 2025, and the Gaming Commission approved them on December 15. Bally's and Resorts World got 15-year licenses. Metropolitan Park got 20 years, based on the size of its investment.
Resorts World went first
Resorts World had the obvious head start. The building, the parking and the gaming floor already existed. The license only changed what it was allowed to put on the floor.
The first stage opened on April 28 with more than 200 live tables, including blackjack, craps, baccarat and roulette, and over 2,500 new commercial slot machines on the upper floors of the old Aqueduct building. The company says more tables and machines are coming later in the year. Its larger plan is a $5.5 billion expansion with a new hotel, restaurants, a 7,000-seat venue and more than 12 acres of public green space on the 72-acre site.
For our listing, that meant a correction of our own. Until this week, our Resorts World NYC page still described it as electronic games only.
The other two are years away
Metropolitan Park is the Hard Rock project, backed by Mets owner Steve Cohen, on the parking lots next to Citi Field. It is an $8.1 billion plan with a planned opening in June 2030. In May 2026 the Queens Daily Eagle reported that it was already about five and a half months behind schedule, with test piling that was meant to start on January 1 not yet begun.
Bally's Bronx is a casino resort of roughly $4 billion at the Ferry Point golf course, near the Whitestone Bridge. Bally's bought the land from the city for $156.6 million in February 2026 and is aiming for mid-2030, which its chairman has said the company can beat.
We found no announced plan for a temporary casino at either site. Until there is one, Resorts World is the only place in the five boroughs with live dealers.
Where the old story went wrong
The original version of this post said Manhattan was about to get a real casino. That was the standard view for most of the process, and the reason it was wrong is worth understanding.
The committee rule gave each neighborhood's elected officials something close to a veto. The six members were appointed by the governor, the mayor, the borough president, and the local state senator, assembly member and council member. Four votes against were enough. Each Manhattan site had organized opposition and officials willing to listen to it, and in a casino process built around local consent, that settled it early.
The Queens and Bronx winners had something the Manhattan bids lacked. Resorts World was already a big local employer, Bally's already ran the golf course it planned to build on, and Metropolitan Park was pitched as the development of a parking lot. Money was never the deciding factor.
Empire City is the reader-facing casualty. It stays a racino with electronic games, about nine miles north of the Bronx site that will one day have live tables. Our casinos near New York City page lists everything within reach today, including Resorts World Catskills upstate.
For a New Yorker who wants a live blackjack table, the answer changed on April 28: it is the A train to Aqueduct, not a bus to Atlantic City.
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- new-york
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- queens
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