MA Casino Developments

6 Million in Traffic congestion? The state needs another 6 Billion for a massive upgrade of Transit.

The site in Everett should be used for HOUSING. Supply and demand (more housing lowers the cost of housing) And Monsanto should be paying for the cleanup for all the poison they left in the ground near the city.
 
I love seeing land like this being developed and bringing life back to the banks of the Mystic would be great, and usually I'm all for height, but not in this case. That building will stick out like a sore thumb. It will be visible from miles around and I'm not sure if I want the primary land mark in the whole area being a casino. Plus the traffic along rt28 and around Sullivan Sq. is going to be a disaster of far greater proportions than anything $6 million will address. East Somerville and Station Landing are already a traffic mess, I can't imagine what they will be like with a completed Assembly row, Partners and a Wynn Casino.
 
Ruairi said:
I love seeing land like this being developed and bringing life back to the banks of the Mystic would be great, and usually I'm all for height, but not in this case. That building will stick out like a sore thumb. It will be visible from miles around and I'm not sure if I want the primary land mark in the whole area being a casino.
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Currently, viewed from Assembly Square, the primary landmark is a generating plant, its six smoke stacks and a windmill. Try streetview from any direction, and today, Everett-on-Mystic is not a quaint village but is "smokestacks and industro-hulks".

If the wrong kinds of photons impinging on your retina are really a source of upset, screening that view with shiny 200' to 300' building is not going to make it worse, and is, indeed, the *only* way it is going to get better.

davem supplied us with this massing model. (as viewed from upstream on the Mystic and a hypothetical bridge crossing left-to-right to tie to Assembly ). The Earhart Dam is in the foreground.
MysticBridge_zpsb4496b42.png
, which might be a bit short, but basically it shows that from Somerville's Mystic shore (at Assembly Square) all Wynn's casino does is block your view of of the electric plant.
 
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Hopefully the Casino bill on the ballot in Nov to vote against.

I am not against having casinos in the state but I am against the TRAFFIC SCENARIO or the upgradable transit that is not getting addressed and the Casino in Revere and Everett will effect everybody driving around these areas including 93.

Vote against the Casino for Less Traffic
 
Arlington said:
Currently, viewed from Assembly Square, the primary landmark is a generating plant, its six smoke stacks and a windmill. Try [https://www.google.com/maps/dir/42..../data=!3m1!4b1!4m4!4m3!1m0!1m0!3e0]streetview from any direction[/url], and today, Everett-on-Mystic is not a quaint village but is "smokestacks and industro-hulks".
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I grasp the context here, but honestly the rendering I've seen is pretty Vegas for this location. It might be better than smokestacks, but I do think it will be pretty tacky for the "urban concept" Assembly Square to be permanently presented with a vista of a shimmering gold hotel and casino tower.

Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun don't look like that. I get that gold is kind of Wynn's thing, but restraint might be helpful here.
 
Equilibria said:
I do think it will be pretty tacky for the "urban concept" Assembly Square to be permanently presented with a vista of a shimmering gold hotel and casino tower.
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The solution to pollution is dilution: add more tall buildings and hide the Wynn tower in plain sight. Eventually both Sullivan Square and the Gateway Center (Target/Home Depot/Costco) will get tall urban concepts of their own.

For now only Wynn is crazy/brave/unique enough to go first.
 
Arlington said:
The solution to pollution is dilution: add more tall buildings and hide the Wynn tower in plain sight. Eventually both Sullivan Square and the Gateway Center (Target/Home Depot/Costco) will get tall urban concepts of their own.

For now only Wynn is crazy/brave/unique enough to go first.
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What? Sullivan Square will, but that hardly helps the view from Assembly and points north. The Gateway Center is isolated by the river, the railroad tracks, and Route 16. It contains retail which is probably pretty important to people in the surrounding towns (like it or not, Target is the most important store in many peoples' lives). It's going nowhere until there's rail transit over the Mystic, and maybe not even then.

Casinos are insular structures which don't breed dense development around them. That's entirely by design - they want you to forget whether it's day or night outside while you lose your paycheck and life savings, not roam around outside checking out cobblestones and planters.

I'm not necessarily against this project, but it's not realistic to expect it to be a catalyst.
 
The proposed building is incredibly tacky and out of context. Looks like a mall at the bottom and like everything else Wynn Resorts has done at the top. Which is pretty unsurprising considering that in the much praised video he says he doesn't care what it looks like from the outside.

What is more concerning is people's idea that this project will be anything like as successful as Vegas, and will not be anything like a windfall for any of the communities. Hopefully some of these agreements begin to give people a better sense of what money will actually come out of this.

That said, the only real benefit to my mind is that the project will remediate the pollution at the property.

Is there anywhere shown a financial model or even presentation on what the benefits of this proposal are meant to be?
 
Equilibria said:
The Gateway Center is isolated by the river, the railroad tracks, and Route 16. It contains retail which is probably pretty important to people in the surrounding towns (like it or not, Target is the most important store in many peoples' lives). It's going nowhere until there's rail transit over the Mystic, and maybe not even then.
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Even Target will eventually get tired, as K marts did, Playtime did and Meadow Glen has and be replaced, and that replacement is likely to get "urban ring" bus and a better walking path to Wellington. Gateway Center will eventually get tall, and for all I know will get an urban-concept Target on the ground floor with towers above. As it is, there's way too much parking at Gateway Center now. You could easily drop a mixed use block in the no-man's-land between Target, Home Depot and Costco today and only make things better.

Equilibria said:
Casinos are insular structures...I'm not necessarily against this project, but it's not realistic to expect it to be a catalyst.
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I'm not expecting it to be a catalyst except in the very limited sense that it is a better companion than a brownfield and a power plant, and that its neighbors will be a little more "buildable" just in the sense that they won't be looking into the abyss.

Rather than exerting some kind of "dont challenge my height" force-field (as Philly City Hall did) Wynn's casino is more likely to say "its ok to build a tall thing around here" and thereby get diluted.
 
Arlington said:
which might be a bit short, but basically it shows that from Somerville's Mystic shore (at Assembly Square) all Wynn's casino does is block your view of of the electric plant.
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I don't love the power plant, but I actually don't hate it and I do like the windmill. I actually think the casino will be a lot taller than that rendering shows and when it comes to design, there's nothing unique about it, it makes no effort to tie in to the neighborhood. I'm not a huge fan of Assembly Row but I do love the way they've kept the steel structure from the old ford plant and made a feature of it, It's the little things. And for all Steve Wynns charming chat and insistence on process and design, It looks like it took some intern in an office in Nevada about 20 minutes. There's absolutely no sense of place, Infact they are probably based on the same plans for a similar proposal in some state hundreds of miles away.
 
Well that just makes the video of him above look daft. Process, design blah blah, taxi for Mr. Wynn.
 
Ruairi said:
it makes no effort to tie in to the neighborhood...Infact they are probably based on the same plans for a similar proposal in some state hundreds of miles away.
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The "neighborhood" is a railroad, a collection of big box retailers, a flood-control dam, a large bus maintenance barn, a LNG gasification plant, and an agglomeration of electric-generation-and-distribution monsters.

How, exactly, does one "tie in" to that? Shape the building like this:
high-voltage-insulator-1.jpg


Sure, Casinos are self-contained and might as well be a grounded space ship. So's our Convention Center.
 
Arlington said:
The "neighborhood" is a railroad, a collection of big box retailers, a flood-control dam, a large bus maintenance barn, a LNG gasification plant, and an agglomeration of electric-generation-and-distribution monsters.
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I was thinking the same thing in reference to the "neighborhood." There is no neighborhood in any meaningful sense. Even if a casino could mesh with it's surroundings (which they generally don't, on purpose) there are no surroundings here to mesh with. The Wynn plan does engage the river, which is plus.

I vastly prefer the Everett location over Revere because the Everett site has virtually no urban potential whatsoever. Nothing good is going into that Everett site - if we have to put a casino somewhere near Boston we might as well put it in the most useless place possible.
 
Arlington said:
The "neighborhood" is a railroad, a collection of big box retailers, a flood-control dam, a large bus maintenance barn, a LNG gasification plant, and an agglomeration of electric-generation-and-distribution monsters.

How, exactly, does one "tie in" to that? Shape the building like this:
high-voltage-insulator-1.jpg


Sure, Casinos are self-contained and might as well be a grounded space ship. So's our Convention Center.
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they would be great!
I'm not an architect but I'm sure there are tons of ways to tie any design in to the Mystic, Everett, Somerville and Charlestown. And yea, tie in to the industrial nature of the area or perhaps something that complemented Assembly row on the other side of the river.
What annoys me is not the fact that they have made a poor effort, it's the fact that they have made no effort at all.
 
I'm curious to know how people think the shops and entertainment/restaurants would fare at Wynn/Everett...seems like an upscale mall-like atmosphere wouldn't gain the critical mass it needs to succeed in this location...Everett is far from luxurious, Charlestown is small and mixed, somerville has outlets right across, I just don't see it.
 
617 said:
I'm curious to know how people think the shops and entertainment/restaurants would fare at Wynn/Everett...seems like an upscale mall-like atmosphere wouldn't gain the critical mass it needs to succeed in this location...Everett is far from luxurious, Charlestown is small and mixed, somerville has outlets right across, I just don't see it.
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Most casinos are in the middle of nowhere. They are intended to be a complete destination in their own right. That is why they are so anti-urban. They neither want nor need support from their surroundings. They just need a big parking lot/garage.
 
http://www.boston.com/business/news...M/story.html?p1=Topopage:Test_B:Main_headline

I hadn't seen this laid out in the same place before, so I didn't realize how massive the difference is. How is it possible that the gaming board really give Wynn the right to pay 30 times less than Mohegan Sun had negotiated? What was the basis? Given that there have never been casinos in MA before, the Mohegan agreement (and whatever they have with Revere) would represent a pretty strong precedent to me, especially considering the perceived weakness of that proposal against Wynn.

I wonder if the gaming commission isn't taking Mohegan seriously, or if they're worried about losing the referendum if Suffolk Downs is the selected proposal. If they can encourage Wynn not to give up, then select the proposal in the place lots of Boston area residents couldn't place on a map, they'd probably wring some more votes out of apathetic folks who don't realize how close this is to Sullivan Square.

EDIT: The agreement between Mohegan Sun and Revere was for $25 million/year. The commission is clearly insane.
 
aaaaaa said:
The process is that the casino and surrounding communities work to come to an agreement on mitigation payments. If they cannot come to an agreement it can go to arbitration, which is what Somerville and Chelsea decided to do with Wynn. They ended up getting far less than they wanted. Now Walsh is boycotting arbitration leaving the decision up to the Gaming Board, but they have not made a decision yet.
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True. Correction: The arbitrators are insane.

It will however, ultimately be the Commission who decides which of these proposals gets the license. Given that they're nominally representing the public, I would certainly hope that they award it to the applicant willing to pay something like $50 million to municipalities as opposed to the one who went to arbitration over a $1.5 million proposal from Somerville and is seeking to pay somewhere around $5 million total to surrounding communities.

Seriously - Medford's agreement with Mohegan Sun is for $600k. That's the same amount Wynn wants to pay a city directly across a bridge from his site.

I don't really care about whose proposal is better other than that. The Commission isn't there to represent the interest of gamblers (at least, not until the casinos open). They should go with the better deal, period. Mohegan's is better by many orders of magnitude.
 
From Universal Hub:

If not the world, at least the Mystic River could be Wynn's oyster

By adamg on Tue, 07/22/2014 - 3:35pm

If Wynn gets the state's casino license for greater Boston, it says it will pay a local clean-water group to "seed" the Mystic's mouth with up to 250,000 oysters as a natural water-filtration system that could also help re-establish an estuary ecosystem there.

The Massachusetts Oyster Project has been working to bring oysters back to the waters of Boston Harbor because the bivalve's natural feeding habits - basically opening up and letting water flow in - are great at filtering particulates out of the water, some 30 gallons' worth of water a day.
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