It’s a massive loss for all of the partners in the Times Square casino project—including its most famous one, whose up-from-nothing, keep-close-to-the-streets story was at the center of the closing argument. “We from these neighborhoods,” Jay-Z told the advisory committee members as they sat across a conference table over the summer. “We hear a lot of talk about community. We are the community.”
“We’re not saying, ‘Give it to us because we happen to be Black, Hispanic, and female,’” Perez tells me, right before the big vote. “No, that’s not what we’re saying. Of course not. But we are saying, ‘Don’t ignore who we are, what we stand for, where we come from, where we’ve been, everything that we’ve accomplished. Please don’t ignore that.’”