New York’s Oneida Indian Nation has set March 1 as the opening date for the tribe’s third casino, a 500-slot operation near Syracuse called Point Place Casino.
The $40 million venue, located in Bridgeport in Madison County, also will feature 20 live table games, and in all will be considerably smaller than the Oneidas’ flagship Turning Stone Resort Casino in Verona, which houses some 2,000 slots and table games. Rather it will be closer in scale to the tribe’s Yellow Brick Road Casino in Chittenago, which opened in 2015.
Measuring 65,000 square feet, Point Place also will offer two casual restaurants, two bars, a bakery and chocolate shop and will provide more than 200 permanent jobs.
The opening will follow by two weeks the debut of the state’s largest commercial casino, Resorts World Catskills, and will bring the number of New York casinos, privately held and Native American, to 12.
The Oneidas have an agreement with the state that guarantees the tribe a casino monopoly in a 10-country area surrounding its federally recognized homeland. This should help underwrite Point Place’s success in an increasingly crowded statewide market. Not counting Resorts World Catskills, the three operating commercial casinos―all of which have opened in the last 14 months―have fallen short of initial annual revenue projections by more than $200 million combined.
