"Bringing a casino to NYC would be great for the city"

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday mornings. Well, we all love New York. We want New York to survive. And I have a good friend with us that wants New York to survive. His name is Michael Hirshman. He originally I think he was in New Yorker, but he’ll tell us. And he is a chief executive officer of cel of You Group, which is

0:19 the old Solo Solo Properties. And Michael Hirshman, tell us about yourself before we talk about New York.

0:29 Speaker 2 Well, look, it’s good to hear from you, it’s good to talk to you. Yeah. I went to sing University of New York. I was born in Brooklyn, raised out on the Island, went to John J. Collins and Criminal Justice in New York City. This is really going to date me. Do you remember John Lindsey.

0:49 Speaker 1 John Lindsey, Well, his police Commissioner, Bob McGuire is still on the Board of Police athletically with me.

0:57 Speaker 2 So John, I’ve worked in the Lindsay administer for the New York City Department Investigation and after that for the New York State Special Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Before I left and went down to Washington to be the chief Investigative of the Senate Watergate Committee and stayed in Washington for about seven eight years, almost ten years, working on the

1:22 Hill and working in the executive branch, including in the State Department. So I know a little bit about New York. I know a little bit about Washington, and this is what I do know about New York. New Yorkers are the toughest people on the face of the earth. I don’t care whether you’re looking in Miami, in Detroit, in

1:41 Los Angeles and Boston. We are the toughest people. And this city is a great city. And there’s a lot of naysayers. Now New York is the first ones because we’re cynical. We’ll tell you New York has problems. So we don’t like anyone from outside New York bad mouth in New York. We went, we made it through the

2:02 aids of pandemic. We had the highest number of fatalities in any New York city. This was back in the late seventies, late eighties. Then we went through nine to eleven, and a year after nine to eleven, we went through Superstorm Sandy. If you remember, we had we had subways that were turned into swimming pools. The stock market closed,

2:26 down for a month, and then COVID came along, and now, of course everyone’s saying Bloomberg said, we’ve lost you know, a lot of big companies, a trillion dollars in assets moving out of New York City. Let’s put that in perspective.

2:45 We have the two largest stock markets in the world here, six ten thousand companies listening respectively, with marketing caps of almost fifty trillion dollars. We have seven hundred theaters. We have one hundred and seventy museums. Let me ask you, John, how many museums does Palm Beach have, or Austin, Texas or Asheville, North Carolina. They’re lucky if they have one

3:12 known museum, much less the number that we have. If you work in New York City, and I can say this because I run a pretty big sized company in New York City, one year of experience in New York City has worked five years of experience anywhere else in this country, I.

3:32 Speaker 1 Agree with you one hundred and ten percent. Well, how did Frank Sinatra say it? If you could make it there, you could make it anywhere.

3:39 Speaker 2 Make it anywhere. And I remember I think it was actually was it was former may of Cox, who said New York is where the future comes to audition. We can’t be we can’t be complacent in this city. We’ve gone through a downturn. If we want to maintain our status there’s the number one city in the world, which

4:07 we are now, we have got to keep fighting to gain economic viability. That’s why I think that bringing a casino to New York City, and particularly bringing into Manhattan, will be great for the city. It’ll create.

4:27 Speaker 1 Now, you want to build a casino on the old Solo property on the east side. What street is that? That’s beautiful property.

4:37 Speaker 2 Yeah, it’s the largest piece of undeveloped property in New York six point seven acres. It’s between thirty eighth and forty first Street on First Avenue, between First Avenue and the River, and it usould be old the ugly old Khan ed plant. We bought it. Sheldon bought that property twenty four years ago. We built on part of it.

5:00 We have zoning right now to put up four buildings on that property. When we learned that New York State was going to have three casino licenses downstate, we decided, well, let’s put a casino underground. Unobtrusive. Let’s put a twelve hundred and fifty room hotel branded Hotel Beautiful Hotel and wellness center, a park, a museum dedicated to freedom and democracy,

5:30 because there’s no a museum in the world that’s dedicated to the principles of democracy. And we want to put on there as well, a close to five acre park because there’s very little green space down there. And as I mentioned to you weeks ago, thirteen hundred and fifty residulchil units, about five hundred and fifty of that will

5:52 be affordable housing. We need these sorts of projects in New York to continue to claim the time of the greatest city in the world.

6:02 Speaker 1 I agree with you. So what they’re me and you, we have to work hard to get rid of the crime in the city. And there are some movements to the I think they realize that no matter how much they tell us that crime is down, that nobody believes it.

6:21 Speaker 2 Yeah, because everyone knows someone who’s been a victim. Okay, But the fact of the matter is the statistics show that the crime in the city, particularly a violent crime statistically, is going down.

6:36 Speaker 1 I pray for that.

6:39 Speaker 2 Look, it’s inevitable were beginning to take the hand call cuffs off the police department. We have a mayor who’s a former ex comp They’re starting to do their job better, and I believe that the city is now turned the corner on crime. Do we have other problems? We have migrants us. We still have a lack of enough affordable

7:04 housing in this city. We know from past experience all of those problems we can overcome because we have done it in the past. We’ve had the worst terrorism attack. I mentioned it earlier in the history. You know, we’ve had terrible storms. We’ve overcome them all. You know why and how we’ve overcome them because we are New Yorkers

7:30 and we are the toughest. Well, we are tough are the face of the earth.

7:35 Speaker 1 Michael, We are out of time, but I’d like to talk to you some more. Beers. We’re both New Yorkers and we both love New York. Thank you so much for coming on this Sunday morning, and we will continue our discussion on how to make New York have a big comeback.

7:51 Speaker 2 Thank you, John be Well,