Aspiring Casino Impresario Gambles on Bringing Players to the Tables Via Ferry
A formerly dead-in-the-water proposal for ferry service from Lower Manhattan to LaGuardia Airport has been given new impetus by a coalition of interests that have a stake in economic revival of the Queens waterfront near the aerodrome.
In a development first reported by Bloomberg News, Steven Cohen (the hedge-find billionaire who owns the New York Mets, the team that plays at Citi Field, in Flushing, Queens, near LaGuardia) has written to Mayor Eric Adams and Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, Jr., urging that a ferry proposal that would run from Lower Manhattan’s Pier 11 on the East River to LaGuardia Airport and Citi Field be fast-tracked.
This development comes against the backdrop of Mr. Cohen seeking city and state permission to erect above a Citi Field parking lot his proposed Metropolitan Park – an $8-billion, 26-story casino complex that will cover 50 acres, and include hotels, food halls, and other amenities.
Mr. Cohen’s request is likely to receive serious consideration. In 2024, according to official disclosures, he hired 14 different lobbying firms to spend more than $2 million persuading government decision-makers to approve his Metropolitan Park plan. This makes Mr. Cohen the biggest spender of the dozen-plus aspirants seeking official blessing to open casinos somewhere in the five boroughs. (A decision is expected by the end of this year.)
In addition to the casino plans, the nearby Queens neighborhood of Willets Point is poised to undergo massive development, with 2,500 new homes slated for development there starting in 2027. New York’s first dedicated soccer stadium, Eithad Park (with a capacity of 25,000 seats), now under construction in Willets Point, is expected to open in two years, while the nearby Arthur Ashe Stadium (home of the U.S. Open tennis tournament, which draws more than one million fans each August) is planning an $800-million expansion.
The area surrounding LaGuardia Airport, Citi Field, and Willets Point, however, is regarded as a transit desert, accessible primarily by car. Mr. Cohen hopes to mitigate this deficit by launching a ferry service that would begin in Lower Manhattan and stop at both LaGuardia Airport and Citi Field. In practice, this would mean little more than adding two stops to an existing NYC Ferry route, which already transits from Lower Manhattan to Soundview/Clason Point (in the Bronx), across the East River from the new destinations.
“Ferry service is a key part of mitigating parking and traffic issues,” Mr. Cohen’s letter argues, adding that launching the program in advance of the growth expected to overtake the area soon, “would be an ideal time to begin this service to provide construction workers, fans and community members a convenient alternative to coming to the area by car.”
Ferry service from Pier 11 (at the foot of Wall Street) to LaGuardia Airport is not a new idea. From 1987 through 2001, such a service was operated hourly by Pan Am and Delta Airlines. In 2022, the Port Authority, which manages the airports in and around New York City, took a fresh look at ways to access LaGuardia after Governor Kathy Hochul killed plans formulated by her predecessor, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, to build a new AirTrain. That proposal would have connected the airport to both the Long Island Rail Road and the subway’s 7 train – in both cases by moving passengers eastward for those transfers, when the vast majority of users would likely be headed to destinations west of LaGuardia (such as Manhattan). This scheme was slated to cost several billion dollars.
Governor Hochul ordered Port Authority planners to consider lower-cost alternatives. One of these was to extend existing East River ferry routes to a pair of proposed docks alongside the airport – one in Bowery Bay near LaGuardia’s Terminal A and another in Flushing Bay, east of the airport. Both options would have required a shuttle bus to connect the ferry wharf with the airport’s various terminals, but such jitneys already operate between terminals within LaGuardia, which means that adding an extra stop would entail relatively minor expense. This proposal never went forward.
In 2024 and again this year, the City Council weighed (but did not enact) a proposed law that would have required the Adams administration to launch a ferry route from Lower Manhattan to LaGuardia Airport. The 2025 version of this bill mandated a similar service to Kennedy Airport. In a parallel development, Community Board 1 (CB1) last summer passed a resolution urging the City Council to adopt the 2024 bill.
The CB1 measure noted that the Board “has advocated for a one-seat ride to an airport for well over a decade. Better airport access would benefit residents, workers and the 2.7 million [annual tourist visitors to Lower Manhattan] by providing low cost, efficient, sustainable and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessible transportation from our district.” The same resolution observed “NYC Ferry already has routes that include Pier 11/Wall Street and Battery Park City/Vesey Street so including either or both of them to routes on LaGuardia Airport would not require a new landing.”
The current ferry route that runs between Pier 11 and Soundview/Clason Point in the Bronx takes 49 minutes. Travel time by ferry to Flushing Bay would be similar, comparing favorably with options currently available to Lower Manhattan residents trying to reach LaGuardia: travel by car can take more than an hour and a trip by subway requires at least one change between trains, plus a bus connection.
If the service were managed by NYC Ferry, the firm that currently plies all the East River routes, the fare presumably would be $4.50, as is the case for all of that company’s operations. Such a levy would be a small fraction of the cost of a taxi or the cost of tolls for a private car driving between Lower Manhattan and LaGuardia, particularly when congestion pricing fees are included.