Revo’s Manchester Rebuild Outgrew Its First Approval

Manchester’s Planning Board cleared Phase 1 of the Revo Casino rebuild on Aug. 20, 2026, after the Even Hotel on John E. Devine Drive had already come down. The vote lets a 216-space temporary lot occupy the hotel pad so the current hall at 1279 South Willow Street can keep running.

Phases 2 and 3 still sit with the traffic engineers. Those later stages hold the new one-floor hall and the rest of a 1,086-space parking field on five lots that used to be three.

The 2024 Yes Did Not Freeze the Building

On Nov. 7, 2024, the same board heard a tighter plan and liked what it heard. Applicants had just won zoning variances. They asked the Planning Board to merge three lots into one and to let the hall run short of parking while the second phase was poured.

That first design put a two-story, 67,175-square-foot casino on the Even Hotel and Harley-Davidson pads, with 290 spaces around it. After the new hall opened, the old Revo building would come down and 750 spaces would take its place. The packet promised 730 gaming seats, two restaurants, and an events room for 800 at a concert or 300 at tables. Builders said they would replant 43 trees somewhere else in the city, and they put construction at 18 months.

It’s a kind of a unique opportunity to transform an area near what’s considered a gateway to the city.

Bryce Kaw-uh, Planning Board chair, November 2024 meeting

No vote landed that night. The Board of Mayor and Aldermen later approved right-of-way signage on Dec. 3, 2024. The praise did the larger job. It told the owners that Manchester would entertain a bigger Revo on the I-293 approach, and it left the lot lines open to another round of buying.

Five Lots and 1,086 Parking Spaces

By June 2026 the application on the city’s agenda was a different animal. Fuss & O’Neill, filing for Granite State Poker Alliance, LLC, asked the board to fold five lots into a single record for a 73,240-square-foot charitable gaming facility with 1,086 parking spaces, up from 562 in the earlier version of that same filing. The extra land let the architects drop the building to one floor and slide it toward the middle of the block.

THE 2024 PLAN VERSUS THE 2026 SITE PLAN

Dick Anagnost, the Manchester developer who owns most of the parcels, told the board the three-lot version had boxed them in. “We’re back,” he said. The application, he added, was the one they had seen before, “except that it was on three parcels. It is now on five parcels,” and the extra land, in his telling, improves traffic, parking, and “a whole bunch of site issues.”

THE FIVE PARCELS ON THE SITE PLAN

• 1279 South Willow Street: The live Revo hall, a 1977 building of 41,559 square feet that started as a movie theater and later a bingo room.
• 55 John E. Devine Drive: The Even Hotel pad, already demolished for Phase 1 parking.
• 115 John E. Devine Drive: The former Manchester Harley-Davidson building, slated to come down in Phase 2.
• 970 Gold Street: The former Taylor Rental site.
• 1050 Gold Street: The Enterprise car sales and rental lot, also in the Phase 2 demolition list.

Taken together, the parcels run more than 14 acres in the Regional Business Corridor. The new hall sits more toward the center, with a roundabout at a cross street tying John E. Devine Drive, Gold Street, and South Willow Street. The South Willow curb cut would land across from South Porter Street. An easement on the west side of the Goodwill lot stays, and another entry would run through the New Hampshire Liquor Store Outlet on Gold Street.

City design rules now push new buildings toward the sidewalk on much of South Willow. Anagnost said a center-lot hall was the only way to keep the walk from car to door short once the parking field grew. June zoning relief followed. Under the ordinance that took effect March 1, 2026, the lot needed 222 shade trees; the plans showed 168, and Anagnost said the property then had eight. Engineer Brian Pratt of Fuss & O’Neill told the Zoning Board that 222 trees on this site would overgrow it. The board granted the landscape and sign variances 5-0.

Demolition Cleared the Hotel Before Phase 2

The Even Hotel did not wait for the last hearing. By April 2026 an excavator was already on the John E. Devine Drive pad. By the Aug. 20 meeting, Phase 1 language treated that demolition as finished work.

PHASE 1 PARKING ON THE GROUND

• Hotel pad: A temporary 216-space lot for the current casino at 1279 South Willow Street.
• Front row: About 60 spaces that already sit in front of the live hall stay in use.
• West lot: The western slice of the current parking field gets blocked so Phase 2 can start.
• Access: Old hotel and Harley driveways stay open in Phase 1; the hotel curb cut comes out later, and the Harley drive on John E. Devine Drive is widened.

Phase 2, still unapproved, would take down the Harley building and the Enterprise building and put up the new casino plus fresh parking and street work. Phase 3 opens that hall, razes the current Revo, and finishes the east parking field. The applicant’s own conditional-use request is blunt about the sequence: keep the existing facility until the new one has occupancy, then tear the old one down and complete the rest of the lot.

That order is the second-order cost of the 2024 welcome. Manchester is already living with a missing hotel and a pending parking lot while the building that justified the land assembly still needs a traffic study.

Why October Still Hangs on Traffic

Hearings on Phases 2 and 3 were continued after the Department of Public Works flagged trip patterns that do not match a normal retail peak. Ryan Pratt, the Fuss & O’Neill engineer on the August file, said talks with DPW had widened the data set. He also noted that the construction season ends in mid-November, which is why the team wanted the Phase 1 parking waiver in hand.

Pratt told the board Phase 1 should not change traffic tied to the casino or the gas station next door. The later phases are another matter. A finished study for Phases 2 and 3 was requested by October, and those hearings were continued to Planning Board meetings that month.

I’m not saying it can’t happen, I’m saying there are a lot of factors in play.

Maggie Baldwin, Planning Board DPW liaison, August 20, 2026 meeting

Baldwin, who sits as the board’s DPW liaison, questioned whether DPW and the New Hampshire Department of Transportation could chew through South Willow, John E. Devine Drive, and Gold Street data on that clock without more help. Chair Stephen Meno asked the board to return in October to the question of a third-party traffic review. DPW had not made a formal request for one as of the August meeting. The conditional-use permit for the Phase 1 parking shortfall passed unanimously.

Anagnost has argued the five-lot map eases the traffic problem the three-lot map created. The city’s public-works staff has not signed that claim. The leftover fight is not whether Revo belongs on South Willow. It is whether the assembled campus produces trips the corridor can take, and who pays for the model that says so.

Who Holds the Manchester Revo License

The name on the June site plan is Granite State Poker Alliance, LLC. The operator of the Revo brand is New Hampshire Group, LLC. In August 2024 that company rebranded the halls as Revo Casino and Social House, folding the old Filotimo rooms in Manchester and Dover, Wonder Casino in Keene, and the Lebanon poker room into one mark. Revo, the company said, is short for revolution.

Peninsula Pacific Entertainment, a Los Angeles gaming firm, is the out-of-state partner behind New Hampshire Group. P2E sold most of its casino holdings to Churchill Downs in 2022 and kept the New Hampshire stake. Anagnost, who also chairs the Charitable Gaming Operators Association of New Hampshire, owns most of the South Willow parcels and speaks for the rebuild. Fuss & O’Neill is the civil engineer of record.

Revo now runs rooms in Manchester, Dover, Keene, Lebanon, and Conway. The Manchester job is the one that eats a hotel, a motorcycle dealer, a car-rental lot, and a rental shop to put a charitable casino in the middle of a commercial gateway. Local land is Anagnost’s. The brand and the operating playbook sit with a California company that already scaled the same model across the state.

Charities Keep 35 Percent of Table Revenue

New Hampshire does not license a commercial casino in the Las Vegas sense. It licenses games of chance, historic horse racing machines, and video lottery terminals inside halls that must split the take with nonprofits. Lottery guidance is plain: a casino may partner with up to two charities for each day games run, a charity may hold up to 10 game dates a year, and charities share 35 percent of revenue from games of chance on the dates they are assigned.

HOW A NEW HAMPSHIRE CHARITABLE HALL IS ALLOWED TO RUN

• Daily partners: No more than two licensed charities may conduct games at one location on one date.
• Date cap: A charity can take up to 10 game dates a year, at one hall or split among several.
• Table split: Charities take 35 percent of gross gaming revenue on their assigned dates, with no loss to the charity in a license period with a single operator.
• Machines: Historic horse racing and video lottery terminals are separate electronic games, also shared with the state and approved charities.

That split is why a 14-acre parking campus on South Willow is not a vanity project. The New Hampshire Lottery Commission’s fiscal 2025 report put $37.0 million in historic horse racing revenue, from 12 locations. The same tables list historic horse racing at $36,960,353, up 58.7 percent from $23,295,845 the year before. The Investigation and Compliance Division, which oversees charitable gaming, posted $49.8 million in operating revenue. In the first quarter of fiscal 2026, Lottery figures show 445 charities received about $19,929,143.

Manchester Revo is already one of the larger rooms in that system. The rebuild is a bet that more seats, more parking, and a hall that can hold concerts will pull more of that statewide handle onto South Willow, with charities riding the same 35 percent cut on table games. The city’s leverage is not the charity statute. It is the curb, the trip count, and the unfinished traffic file.

The Sunoco Rebuild Rides the Same Variances

The casino filing is not the only dirt moving on the block. Aranosian Oil Company, with Fuss & O’Neill again on the drawings, asked to raze the fueling station at 1265 South Willow Street and put back a station with a convenience store, a drive-through restaurant, five double-sided pumps, and one kerosene pump. Pump count falls from eight to six.

A companion subdivision shifts 11,683 square feet from the old hotel lot onto the gas-station lot, taking that parcel to 41,659 square feet. The Zoning Board has already granted the station a stack of coverage, setback, buffer, and façade variances, including lot coverage of 84 percent where 75 percent is allowed. A separate conditional-use request cuts on-site parking from 19 spaces required to 14 provided.

April filings treated the station rebuild as a chance to match the new casino’s look and to plant buffers along the shared edge. The two projects share engineers, a zoning district, and a street that DPW already says does not behave like a normal peak. If the casino’s later phases slip, the station still has its own site plan to finish beside a live hall and a temporary lot.

October’s hearings will not revisit whether Manchester wanted a larger Revo. That question closed, in stages, from the 2024 variances through the August Phase 1 vote. What comes back is a traffic model for a five-lot campus that has already removed a hotel, with a construction season that ends in mid-November and a third-party review still only a question on the chair’s list.