KIAMESHA LAKE – Out with the old school, belly-busting buffet trays, and steak plates piled high at old resorts and casinos. In with Food Network star Scott Conant’s high-end Italian steakhouse.
Out with the windowless casino gaming-floor format, caves that cut players off from the world. In with a window wall, light and views of the Town of Thompson’s birds, bees and trees.
Construction has been on-time and fatality-free for the $1.2 billion, 1.6-million-square-foot, five-star Resorts World Catskills casino, which is scheduled for a March 1 opening on the former Concord Resort Hotel property.
Charlie Degliomini, executive vice president of the casino’s parent company, Empire Resorts, highlighted the features he thinks will set it apart during a recent tour of the site.
More than anything, Degliomini said, the casino will stand out for the luxurious accommodations envisioned by Lim Kok Thay, the Malaysian-Chinese casino magnate behind the project.
Lim is part of the family trust that owns Kien Huat Realty, an investment company that is the majority shareholder in both Empire Resorts and Genting Berhad, a giant Malaysian multinational gaming and business conglomerate.
“Lim’s vision is to cater to both the high-end, ultra exclusive market and the general market,” Degliomini said. “My son was in diapers when we first started talking about a casino being built in the Catskills, and now he’s 24, so it has very special meaning to me to see the project coming together like this.”
Eventually, 4 million people are expected to visit the casino annually. Eighty percent of the traffic will come from Route 17’s Exit 106. The drivers entering the 24-7, 365-day-a-year property will pass fieldstone walls beneath high-end LED streetlights. They’ll toss their keys to a valet or pull into a 2,800-space garage before checking into an 18-story hotel.
The tower’s all-window glass façade is designed, on sunny days, to display a photo-realistic reflection of its surroundings. On a recent weekday inside the tallest building in Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties, workers scurried and wires dangled.
Degliomini said luxury will be the priority for the whole casino, from the personal pools in the garden suites to the private balconies and gym for elite third-floor guests, and several of the six eateries and three bars.
Visitors looking for a quick bite also can visit a food court when they’re not gaming, get their nails done in a salon or golf on the property’s Rees Jones-redesigned 18-hole golf course.
But gambling will be the biggest moneymaker. Degliomini expects Resorts World Catskills will give away 70 percent of its 332 suites to accommodate all the free-spending guests playing 130 table games and 2,150 slot machines.
Asian gamers will be a key driver for the property. The 100,000-square-foot casino floor will feature an area with Mandarin-speaking staff and casino games popular in the Far East.
A 2,000-person event room is expected to attract conferences, mixed martial arts fights and concerts held in conjunction with the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.
To accommodate the guests for those events, earlier plans for an “entertainment village” full of high-end stores have been abandoned in favor of building an extra boutique hotel.
A covered walkway will link the main hotel to the boutique hotel, due in September 2018, which will include a night club and a restaurant.
Local union leaders could not be more enthused about the resort-casino project, which is employing an all-union workforce of 680 construction workers that will rise to 800 in coming months.
Union representatives also are excited about the project improving the local economic picture by creating 1,400 jobs at Resorts World Catskills' main hotel and the casino. Adding in the property’s future golf course and boutique hotel, a nearby indoor-family water park and hotel – owned by EPR Properties and due in spring 2019 – brings the property’s total job count to 2,200.
Alan Seidman, executive director of the Construction Contractors Association of the Hudson Valley, touted the project’s safety so far. Though there have been injuries, there have been no major accidents or fatalities, despite laborers working in two daily shifts, sometimes high in the air, six days a week, from dawn till dusk, since a January 2015 groundbreaking.
“One of my big complaints is that our children don’t have meaningful jobs to come back to,” Seidman said. The resort-casino “is going to be a boon to the region and an opportunity for our kids to live here, and afford it, and pay taxes.”
L. Todd Diorio, president of the Hudson Valley Building Trades Council and business manager of Laborers' Local 17, said union workers hope the casino succeeds, so some are concerned about casino saturation in the Northeast once the project is complete. But Diorio trusts Empire Resorts’ executives.
“They’ve done their homework, and they’re going to go over and beyond the quality of the other casinos in New York state to try to make their money,” Diorio said. “Their goal is to build a destination resort, and I think that’s exactly what it’s going to be.”
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