The new resort World Catskill has been devastated for weeks.
New York's newest and largest commercial casino resort, officially opened to the public a month ahead of schedule in early February, welcomed the grand opening gala's long list of celebrities, including Phil Simms, Lawrence Taylor, Neil Patrick Harris, and Adrian Grenier. Adding to the star power, Jerry Seinfeld's stand-up routine was the first to sell out at RW Epic, the resort's glittering 2,500-seat event center.
There were performances by champagne towers, bubble acrobats, and Cirque du Soleil-style acrobats. An electric violinist performed overlooking the resort's two swimming pools and high-limit private game salons. The month-long celebration continued with a Gavin DeGraw concert and the grand opening of Chef Scott Conant's Italian-influenced steakhouse Celao.
But for all the glamour, the situation, and the rave, the opponents don't exist.
The strong sentiment among some remains that the casino market in the Northeast will be too saturated to overcome. They point to the fierce competition with dozens of other game venues in nearby Connecticut and Pennsylvania. They will remind you of the initial low sales figures for other new game facilities in other states in the United States, including the Delago Resort & Casino and the Tioga Downs Casino. They fear the luxury 18-story, 1.6 million-square-foot resort in upstate New York will suffer the same fate that it reportedly cost $1.2 billion to build.
Jack Kennedy, executive director of Resorts World Catskills Table Game Operations, has been told this before. And while Kennedy, a more than three-decade veteran of the casino gaming industry, understands the claim, he claims it's exactly why he was drawn to helping him leave his Las Vegas Sands company and return to his hometown and open Resorts World Catskills in his state.
"I was very lucky to have had a long career in this business with some very successful companies," explains Kennedy, 58, who was born in Brooklyn. "I think I heard the same kind of negativity and disapproval at first, but we somehow won."
Kennedy moved from New York to Las Vegas when he was 18, where he gritted his teeth in the industry as a valet driver and dealer. One of his first executive positions came in 1988 at Becker Gaming, when he was attempting to turn the bowling alley into a casino called the Arizona Charli's.
"The newspapers were saying local casinos would never operate in Las Vegas, but in their heyday, Arizona Charlie's Casino was the most profitable casino in America for slots per square foot," Kennedy says proudly.
Kennedy also worked for Las Vegas Sands for nearly two decades and remembers what the party's line was from the last judges when Sheldon Adelson planned to build Venice Las Vegas in the late 1990s.
"The same goes for it," Kennedy remembers. "The newspapers were saying that this huge resort on a strip that looked like Venice was never going to work. The papers said that it was too much money and too big. Turns out Sheldon knew what he was doing.
"What can I say? I love helping opponents prove wrong," he added. "I love being part of a new concept in an evolving and competitive market, and that's what I see here with Resort World Catskill."
Kennedy, of course, fully realizes that the status of the large resort World Catskills must have certain aspects to be successful in the long run, and he sees those properties and more when he looks around the property.
The first thing that matters most is the location. The resort is located in Monticello, about 90 miles from New York and close to Northern New Jersey and the Hudson Valley. With more than 500 hotels and thousands of bungalow colonies in the 1950s, the Catskills area has an old and storied history of attracting tourists and was featured in the 1987 hit film Dirty Dancing. 바다이야기