Casino news source: NY Times - http://www.nytimes.com
Slot Machines May Ring Where Steel Was Once Forged
By TERRY PRISTIN
Published: January 10, 2007
BETHLEHEM, Pa., Jan. 4 — Since its coke ovens shut down for the last time in 1998, the mile-long Bethlehem Steel Corporation plant has been a rusty reminder of this small Lehigh Valley city’s proud industrial past. Trees have sprouted between the red bricks, and birds have nested in wire baskets in which steel workers once stored their belongings.
Transactions But in two years or so, the pinging of thousands of slot machines is likely to fill the eerie silence at the steelworks, which once employed 30,000 people and supplied the steel for landmarks like Rockefeller Center and notable projects like the George Washington Bridge.
Last month, Sands BethWorks Gaming, a partnership of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, a hotel and casino company, and a group led by Barry M. Gosin, a New York developer, was awarded one of five hotly contested licenses in Pennsylvania to operate freestanding slots parlors.
Sands BethWorks plans to spend more than $600 million developing a 300-room hotel, a 200,000-square-foot outlet mall and a casino with 3,000 slot machines on a vacant ore field at the former plant. The towering blast furnaces will be illuminated, and a building known as the High House, where battleship guns were manufactured, will be stabilized, the developers said.
The city is expected to approve the final plans within the next few weeks, which would permit the developers to break ground this summer.
Though the first phase of the project involves new construction rather than rehabilitation of the steel plant, the additions have been designed to blend in.
“We wanted to make it look like an industrial site, to respect what was there and not make it look Disneyesque,” said Mr. Gosin, who helped transform the industrial Dumbo area of Brooklyn into a popular neighborhood.
In August 2004, Mr. Gosin, the chief executive of Newmark Knight Frank, an international brokerage and property management company, and his partners bought 124 acres of the 1,800-acre steelworks site for what he now acknowledges was a bargain price of $4 million.
The seller was the New York investor Wilbur L. Ross, who acquired the bankrupt steel company in 2003. The steel company, hoping to redevelop some of its unused buildings as a retail and entertainment complex, had already cleaned up the site. The city had invested $10 million on roads, sidewalks and utilities.
Mr. Gosin, who travels to Bethlehem from New York in a chauffeur-driven Bentley, said he had bought the property without realizing it could be used for a casino. Initially, he planned to focus on converting a 52,000-square-foot building that once housed the steel company’s headquarters into condominiums.
Later, he struck a deal with Las Vegas Sands, whose executives he had come to know while negotiating the lease for a Barneys store to open this year at the Palazzo Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas.
Sands, which was founded by Sheldon G. Adelson, the creator of Comdex, Las Vegas’s first consumer electronics trade show, is building the Palazzo next to its Venetian Resort Hotel Casino. The company also owns the Sands Casino in Macao and is about to open a Venetian there. In May, it received a license to build Singapore’s first gambling resort.
If the Bethlehem project proves successful, Mr. Gosin and William P. Weidner, the president of Las Vegas Sands, said they hoped to expand the hotel, build a convention center and add retail space in a long structure known as No. 2 Machine Shop. Mr. Weidner said he hoped the Bethlehem project would provide a model for the development of other former industrial sites.
Before they could win over the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, the developers had to persuade residents that the casino would not alter the charm of their picturesque city of 72,000 along the Lehigh River. Founded by members of the Moravian Church from Eastern Europe in the 18th century, Bethlehem still has many well-tended German-style buildings from that period.
Unlike many towns that have turned to gambling out of desperation, it has a diverse economic base, with several hospitals and academic institutions. Many residents commute to New York City, about 75 miles away, city officials say. The city, which markets itself as Christmas City, is a popular holiday destination.
The developers say the casino is likely to be a catalyst for developing the former plant as a historic and cultural site that would include a long-delayed National Museum of Industrial History, two performance halls and a new home for the local public broadcasting station. |
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