The .4 billion Wynn Boston Harbor casino in Everett, Massachusetts is starting to rise on the site of the former Monsanto Chemical plant along the Mystic River with a planned opening date of summer of 2019.
Now that the massive hazardous materials cleanup has completed, an underground garage is nearing completion and the girders are starting to go up for the casino resort itself.
Last week city officials and representatives from Wynn Resorts held a public meeting to give an update on the project to residents. The presentation included construction progress, job openings and the plans for the roads that will serve the resort.
Across the river in Boston proper city officials are trying to come up with a plan to relieve the congestion in Sullivan Square, in the Charlestown neighborhood, which is expected to be heavily impacted by casino traffic.
Sullivan Square is one of the city’s busiest intersections and well known for gridlock and a traffic circle that was installed in the 1950s. With the foreknowledge that Sullivan Square can only get worse once the Wynn Boston Harbor opens, city officials have released a plan to renovate the square, making it more pedestrian friendly and easier for drivers to navigate. Some of this is being funded by Wynn Resorts.
That work, which will cost $11 million, will begin in the autumn. It will create several new roads that will redirect some traffic away from the circle.
About 100,000 cars pass through the square each day, fed into it by seven surrounding roads that frequently become gridlocked. Some of these roads will be widened. Some will be redone to divert traffic around the square.
Currently the roundabout is considered something of a danger to people trying to cross the street. The owner of a gym whose clients use the square, told the Boston Globe: “It’s quite dangerous. I fear for my clients. It’s almost like there’s a blind spot for them and for the cars.”
Ultimately the city plans to replace the traffic circle with a street grid. Currently city officials are studying the final design for that grid.
According to James Gillooly, deputy director of the Boston Transportation Department, “The roadway is going to have excellent bicycle facilities, ample open space helping to buffer the residential community from the roadway, and it is going to handle the unavoidable regional traffic that it’s going to have to handle.”
In the process Rutherford Avenue will be altered to look less like a highway, with additional bike lanes and crossing walks and four acres of open space.
Plainridge Park
The Bay State’s first casino to come on line, Plainridge Park Casino in Plainville is testing a pioneering gambling addiction program and so far nearly 13,000 players have signed up.
A report on the “Play My Way” program was given last week the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. The enrollees represent about ten percent of the total eligible customers. The program allows those who sign up to voluntarily set up a spending budget, which the slot machines will remind them of as they approach the limit.
The program is considered cutting edge, perhaps the first of its kind in the U.S., although something similar has been tried in Australia, Canada, Norway and several other nations. Since its initiation with Plainridge, MGM Resorts has signed a deal with GameSense, the company that administers the Play My Way program, to start it in all MGM properties.
The program’s effectiveness is being evaluated by the Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance.
