“It’s like watching a slow-motion mugging,” my friend Dale observed as we walked past the tables at Resorts World New York City, the first of several casinos that will open here before the end of the decade.
It was late in the morning on a cloudy Thursday in southeast Queens, just two days after the casino’s public debut. And the place was already busy. Its roughly 175,000 square feet of gaming excitement somehow feel a good deal smaller than that. The first floor was mostly electric slot machines, virtual roulette tables, bright lights, and big screens entrancing at least a few hundred people. Nobody was talking to each other, but the digital din, the dings and bells and Muzak coming from each machine, was deafening. Many of the patrons were Asian, most of the signs in English and Chinese, a testament to local demographics. The gamblers skewed older but morose young men in baggy clothing milled about among them. If young women were there, I didn’t see them.
These games were Asian-themed in a crude way—cartoon dragons, samurai, vaguely pornographic anime women. Dale and I looked for a way to the real gaming tables, the ones with cards and dice and human dealers, but kept getting lost. We walked outside to a concrete patio where Chinese smokers gazed out on the old Aqueduct Racetrack, where jockeys have vied against each other since the late 19th century, its greenery and classical dimensions easily the prettiest thing about this gruesome would-be adjunct of JFK Airport. The Aqueduct’s last horse race is set for June.
On one side of the patio, there was a massive fake roulette table with giant casino chips for pieces and cornhole boards next to it. It seemed to be a place where parents can park their kids while they hit the slots. Thankfully, there were no children in sight.
