Coney Island development on again?
CONEY ISLAND – After nearly four years of delays, a proposal to remake one of the city’s most recognizable outer borough attractions appears to be on track again.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) announced plans yesterday to spend $96 million in city funds to expand the iconic amusement park through the purchase of seven acres of a nearby property.
The current owner of the park, Thor Equities, had propsed a massive Las Vegas style hotel/entertainment complex for Coney Island as early as 2005. A 2005 article in New York magazine describes the project as follows:
The plan includes megaplexes. An indoor water park. A 500-room, four-star hotel—four stars, in Coney Island!—and, at the center of it all, an enormous, psychedelic carousel laced with visual cues to a Coney Island that Timothy Leary could have dreamed up. Equally spectacular, Sitt hopes, will be a blimp that will take off from the complex’s roof, carrying tourists on joyrides over the city as it flashes the resort’s name in giant technicolor letters: THE BOARDWALK AT CONEY ISLAND.
City officials, however, raised objections to the project in 2007, after Thor Equities had sought nearly $100 million in city funding while failing to live up to some of it’s promises, according to this post from the Gothamist blog.
The Astroland amusement park, long a part of the island’s history, was closed last year after the owner and Thor failed to reach an agreement regarding a lease. The park reopened as Dreamland this past summer, however a dispute over rent again forced the iconic park to close on August 21. Councilman Dominic Recchia (D) took issue with the business dispute, and, after heated discussions, the park was allowed to open for Labor Day weekend.
The revival of the development project by the Bloomberg Administration should prove a very interesting process, as some critics of the proposal have expressed concerns over the character of the popular summer destination, as one activist did in a recent interview:
Coney Island’s unofficial mayor, Dick Zigun, said in July that at first he was pleased by Bloomberg’s masterplan but felt that the neighborhood was give the “ol switcheroo….” that will end with overdevelopment and what Zigun calls “a wall of highrises.”
Anyone who wants a good example of how development – or lack thereof – can affect a summer-time destination should venture down to Wildwood, N.J., once a prospering beach community on the South Jersey Shore and home to it’s own amusement park complex. Just walk a block or two away from the beach and you’ll see a community that would make some of Brooklyn’s toughest neighborhoods look like Westchester County.
Years ago, there was actually a virbant nightlife in Wildwood City; this past summer, many of the popular nightspots remain shuttered, padlocked, and vacant. While the amusements still remain, the economic development for the Wildwood area hasn’t exactly spread to the outlying neighborhoods.
One can only hope that Coney Island doesn’t meet the same fate…
Leave a Response
You must be logged in to post a comment.
