Sands maps its plans for the Nassau Hub

Daily Point

The best-laid plans of dice and men

The conceptual master plan that Las Vegas Sands has submitted to Hempstead Town sheds some additional light on the casino company’s plans for the Nassau Hub in Uniondale.

The plan, which is subject to change, includes a site map that highlights both the land around Nassau Coliseum and the existing Long Island Marriott property. It features three parking garages along the edges of the property — one on Hempstead Turnpike, one on Earle Ovington Boulevard and one on Charles Lindbergh Boulevard. Two of those garages are placed around the existing Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer center space.

At the site map’s center is a large space labeled “Gaming-Dining-Retail.” That space includes an outline of the Coliseum itself. Is that an indication Sands is planning to leave the arena in place, or even use it within its design? Perhaps, although it’s still unclear how exactly that would work. In its attached environmental assessment, Sands notes the “reuse of portions of the existing Coliseum building” as an element of its environmental sustainability plans, which also include electric HVAC systems, water conservation, the use of natural light and more.

Sands has placed hotel towers on either side of the arena space. And splitting the gaming and retail space is a pool and spa area connecting the two towers.

To the south of the gaming, dining and retail space is Sands’ planned entertainment venue.

On the west edge of the Hub is a space marked M.I.C.E. That’s not a space for Mickey and Minnie; instead, it stands for Meeting, Incentive, Conference & Exhibition, a term often used in business travel and hospitality industries that encompasses everything from business meetings and travel rewards for employees and regular customers to larger conferences and trade shows.

The conceptual plan also includes significant sections of green space, along with roads cutting through the property.

Also labeled on the plan: the existing Marriott hotel, and all of the parking around it. It’s unclear whether Sands will use the hotel as is, renovate it, or tear it down and build something new.

Sands’ initial environmental assessment, also included in its submission to the town, involved a questionnaire of sorts that Sands had to complete, along with several attachments. Within it, Sands says it anticipates its effort would be a two-phase project, with the estimated completion of the first phase in 2025 and completion of the second phase in 2029.

“Phases are dependent upon approval of gaming license and zoning and land use approvals,” Sands wrote.

The Sands submission to the town, which has zoning authority over the Hub property, comes as the state licensing process slowly moves along. Every applicant will need approvals from the appropriate zoning authority and from a Community Advisory Committee, a group of local residents selected by elected officials. For every applicant, those approvals will be required before the state even considers its license application.

— Randi F. Marshall randi.marshall@newsday.com

Pencil Point

The oldest democracy

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Reference Point

Our education system's taxing inadequacies

As warnings go, this one was dire:

“American education in general is more and more revealed in a serious state. Not only are there inadequacies in plant facilities, teacher personnel, and the standard of teachers’ pay. A more serious shortcoming is in the type of teaching done in American schools, possibly even in some Long Island schools.”

Worries about the conditions of our schools, the number of teachers, the amount they’re paid, and a hint of the culture wars. It all seems so au courant. But the paragraph above was written by Newsday’s editorial board on Sept. 7, 1948, a full three-quarters of a century ago.

The occasion, of course, was the return of students to school and in the piece called “Back to School for What?” the board was concerned about “what is going into Junior’s mind. The grades he brings home indicate how he’s doing, but not what he is learning. Will he acquire the basic essentials of education: mathematics, history, civics, geography, spelling, grammar? If not, why not?”

We could riff — or wince — at the fact that geography and civics were once considered essentials of education. But that would be a digression from the main point that American education allegedly was in trouble. Back in 1948, Newsday’s board was concerned by a reconsideration of American history exemplified by Charles A. Beard’s “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States,” which posited that the founders’ economic self-interest was a more important motive than lofty idealism in the drafting of the historic document. The board said such books left Americans “ready and willing to sell their country short” with the result that “inevitably this cynicism crept into our educational system. It became less fashionable in High School to learn trigonometry than to study Ancient Greek Band Instruments, or some ‘social science’ with the course name of ‘The Family’ or ‘Relationships Between North and South.’ ”

That eventually led to the growth of “Progressive Education,” the board wrote, calling the movement “a rebellion against our established way of teaching children to be American citizens.”

Newsday's board determined that the cost could be found in survey results. One found that 63% of a group of college students “is sold on socialism,” another revealed that 68% of 4,200 students at “27 leading universities” failed an exam in arithmetical reasoning, and other surveys “show abysmal ignorance of history, civics, and geography — learning they should absorb long before college, at local grade and high schools.”

That last comment presaged modern complaints about students not understanding math and not being taught civics and geography, again positioning education concerns along that continuum that stretched back at least those 75 years.

After registering all those worries and critiques, the board made the case that taxpayers should take note of those concerns and remember that education is no exception to the rule that you get what you pay for. But its suggested remedy would receive little support today.

“School taxes are high,” the board wrote, “but perhaps not high enough.”

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com, Amanda Fiscina-Wells amanda.fiscina-wells@newsday.com
 

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