Not that I would ever go there now or after a “revitalization,” but being from Brooklyn, modern day Coney Island is a complete ghetto embarrassment to all of New York. Bring on the malls, condos, rides, whatever. Maybe clear the blight first with a fuel bomb or something. Anything.1
Wow: ‘a ghetto embarrassment’?! People like you do not deserve to be living in New York City. Get thee to the suburbs, bitches!2
If you are a nostalgic soul longing for the old-fashioned funk of old Coney Island and are planning a visit soon, chances are you may be bewildered by what you’ll see. You’ll be surprised to jump off the train at the Coney Island Stillwell Station only to be welcomed by a “Thor Equities and Brooklyn Welcome you to Coney Island” banner on top of an IT’Sugar franchise. Across the street from Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, you’ll see visitors crowding a Nets Shop by Adidas in search of its signature black-and-white apparel and swimwear. Along Surf Avenue, between an empty lot and a “retail space available” placard, you’ll spot a Popeyes, an Applebee’s, and a Tuscan-styled Subway Cafe franchise—for those unable to find more original food options around the area. And while you roam along the boardwalk searching for the original Gregory & Paul’s Diner or Ruby’s Bar & Grill amidst gift stores selling Coney T-shirts, sandals, and sunglasses, you’d better keep clear of the costumed characters posing for tips—something you may have thought only happened in Times Square. It is all part of the transformations that have swept the neighborhood since the area was rezoned in 2009. Many turn-of-the-century buildings, including the Henderson’s Music Hall, the Bank of Coney Island, and the Shore Hotel, have been torn down in expectation of new development. Most of the grungy arcade game parlors along Surf Avenue have been boarded up, while a new fancy amusement park called Luna Park has substituted the old gritty amusements. There are talks of new fancy residential developments here too. In 2011, the city approved a luxury mixed-use 428,000-square-foot project called Ocean Dreams, which will include glass and steel towers ranging from 14 to 22 stories, 415 market-rate condos with views of the ocean, and almost 25,0000 square feet of commercial space. Stanley “Stan” Fox began working in his family’s arcade at 12 years of age. Now 63, he told me what he thinks of the changes:
They are turning Coney Island into a theme park, which it never was. It was a collection of large and small-sized amusements; a lot of mom-and-pops, some big parks like Steeplechase and Wonder Wheel, surrounded by lil’ shops…. There’s still a few mom-and-pops, but most of the games here, many closed down. There’s still some life, but I think in a few years they might disappear, unfortunately.
Facing the Atlantic Ocean on the southern tip of the Brooklyn shore, the peninsula of Coney Island developed over the 19th and early 20th centuries from a gracious seaside resort of Victorian hotels and private beaches to a popular midway of vaudeville theaters, bathhouses, arcades, dance halls, and thrill rides, which attracted New Yorkers, immigrants, and visitors alike. At the turn of the century, Coney Island had become a popular display of magnificent architectures, electric arcade games, and never-before-seen technological innovations. This is why it has been described as the utopian laboratory of modern mass culture3 and as the place best representing the zeitgeist of New York City in the industrial age:4 in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, electric lights, bizarre machineries, roller coasters, and even baby incubators were all pioneered in Coney Island.
The first glorious amusement parks at Coney Island were strongly indebted to the City Beautiful Movement and particularly to Burnham’s “White City,” a model for an idealized, harmonious urban environment unknown to most American city dwellers of the time. Dreamland and Luna Park featured monumental buildings and slender towers, all generously decorated and orderly articulated among green spaces, wide canals and picturesque lagoons (Figure 5.1). The pioneering steel structures that characterized Coney Island in the 1940s—the vertiginous Parachute Jump, the Wonder Wheel, and the many roller coasters—embodied the 1939–1940 World’s Fair’s quest for a revolutionary technological utopia (Figure 5.2). But Coney Island was also renamed “The Nickel Empire” and “The People’s Playground” because it provided accessible recreation for the working classes of New York5 and of the entire world. In 1925, an Italian immigrant named Giuseppe Cautela wrote: “When you bathe at Coney Island, you bathe in the American Jordan. It is holy water. Nowhere else in the United States will you see so many races mingle in a common purpose for a common good.”6 According to author Michael Immerso, “Coney Island was more than an incubator of amusement parks. A playground for the masses, it became the resort of last resort for an entire generation of Americans that lived through the Great Depression and staked a claim to a portion of its beach and boardwalk.”7
Figure 5.1 Coney Island, in Luna Park (between ca. 1910 and ca. 1915).
Figure 5.2 Loop the Loop, Coney Island, New York, 1903.
A prototype for the artificial, light-fed, congested consumer landscape that would forge Manhattan in the following years, Coney Island was the creature of visionary ambitions as much as the product of unscrupulous entrepreneurship. Yet the very ruthless development that had given birth to Coney Island’s glory at the turn of the century was to become its worst foe after World War II, when the peninsula became the fiery battlefield of conflicting redevelopment utopias, social unrest, political ambitions, and greedy speculations. Throughout all these years, both city planning and private development have waged a ferocious war against Coney Island, a war that is still unfolding today.
Coney Island’s history of decline begins in 1938, when Robert Moses assumed control of the area as city park commissioner; in 1941, he widened the boardwalk inland, erasing dozens of arcade amusements and vernacular architectures, including the municipal bathhouse and the ruins of the legendary Dreamland Park, which had opened in 1904 and had been destroyed by fire seven years later.8 By making extensive use of eminent domain, Moses also razed several blocks of amusements at the site of Dreamland’s fairground to clear land for new venues: the New York Aquarium (1957) and the Abe Stark ice skating rink, “a dark brown prison covered in barbed wires.”9 Both were surrounded by vastly unused parking lots, as was common practice in the era of modernist urban planning.
Later in 1953, while running the city’s Slum Clearance Committee, Moses again had huge swaths of land rezoned to make room for high-rise housing projects: the Coney Island Houses, completed in 1956, destroyed more lots of amusements and hundreds of private houses.10 After the urban renewal plans took place and old middle-class houses were replaced with towering public housing projects, local crime rates soared, giving rise to episodes of gang violence and racial conflicts that culminated in the 1960s and 1970s. In these dark years, fewer people ventured into Coney Island, forcing amusement owners to abandon their properties, while repeated episodes of arson obliterated much of the remaining structures in the amusement area. Coney’s heyday had come to an end.
In 1964, Coney’s last remaining large amusement park, Steeplechase,11 which had opened in 1897 and had thrived since then, was shut down. The property was sold to Fred Trump, millionaire real estate developer with large development ventures in Brooklyn and Queens, and father of future US president Donald Trump. Fred had ambitious visions for Miami-style luxury condominiums on the ocean waterfront and spent years struggling with the city to get the area rezoned to residential uses. But Trump’s plans were opposed by the Lindsay administration, which instead claimed it intended to clear the land and redevelop it as a public park. Realizing that there was a chance the city might landmark the dilapidated Steeplechase Pavilion (which dated back to 1907) and crush his development visions, Trump rushed to have it demolished: in the summer of 1966, he organized a “funeral party for the amusement industry,” where young women in bikinis handed out stones which Trump invited the press to throw through the stained-glass walls of the pavilion; weeks later, he had it bulldozed.12 But Fred Trump’s dreams of luxury condos on the beach never approached reality, nor did the city’s plans.
In the early 1970s, Norman Kaufman, an amusement operator who had leased the property from Trump, created a makeshift amusement park on the site and publicly disclosed plans to eventually resurrect the historic Steeplechase. In 1969, however, the city purchased the lot from Trump, and proceeded to sue Kaufman with lengthy legal battles in order to terminate the lease.13 In 1981, the small park was eventually evicted, and the lot remained vacant for two more decades.
In the late 1970s, the Koch administration came up with yet another plan to revitalize Coney Island—this time by bringing in gambling and casinos, as had been done in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The plan created a frenzy of land speculation in which property was bought up in stock, while the few remaining rides were quickly removed to prepare land for future development. However, the state legislature never legalized gambling, and the land ended up with even more vacant lots.
In the mid-1980s, Harlem businessman Horace Bullard, founder of the Kansas Fried Chicken chain, spent a fortune buying up land at Coney Island, and revealed visionary plans for a vintage theme park inspired by the original Steeplechase; this time, the plan was approved by the city in 1986. But in the midst of the late 80s’ economic crisis, the park failed to materialize. The deal was finally broken when Mayor Giuliani took office in 1994 and decided to build a baseball stadium on its site. Dropping the idea of a large theme park, Bullard announced his intentions to restore the once-glorious Thunderbolt roller coaster, which had been prominently featured in Woody Allen’s 1977 romantic comedy Annie Hall, as the centerpiece of a scaled-down amusement park. But in an unpredictable turn of events, in November 2000, claiming that the roller coaster was in immediate danger of collapse, Giuliani ordered an early-morning raid and had it bulldozed. The Thunderbolt now gone, a new stadium was built on the property, a move that crushed Bullard’s dreams but worked out pretty well for Fred Wilpon, real estate developer and majority owner of the New York Mets.14
The demolition of the Thunderbolt, which had been seen by historic preservationists and Coney enthusiasts as a sort of monument to survival, was the climax of a decades-long struggle of city planning against the livelihood of Coney Island’s amusement industry. In fact, the history of development at Coney Island for over 70 years has been the history of its progressive obliteration: unimaginative city planning, private greed, and political opportunism have reduced the “People’s Playground” to a wasteland, culminating with a devastating wave of demolitions during the first Bloomberg term—and with new, unexpected twists and turns in the latest years.
For decades, Coney Island’s notorious reputation as a violent urban jungle was reinforced by alarming press and TV reports telling frightening stories of gang attacks and street shootings. Especially during the bleak days of the 1970s, movies like The Warriors, which tells the story of a Coney Island street gang engaged in an epic turf battle for survival, presented the American public with images of Coney Island as an urban inferno, popularizing the image of an “urban dystopia, a marginal space inhabited by the underbelly of the city where urban problems are endemic and untreatable”15 (Figure 5.3).
Figure 5.3 Stills from the movie The Warriors (1979).
Still today, Coney Island is to some people nothing but an infamous, impoverished, and crime-ridden ghetto where the food is bad and the people are trashy. For other New Yorkers, however, Coney Island will always hold a special role as a beloved, one-of-a-kind retreat from the stress of city life. Despite the loss of many of its open-air rides over the last decades, Coney Island has somehow managed to survive ebbs and flows, thanks to attractions that continue to draw visitors and locals: its beach and boardwalk, the legendary Cyclone roller coaster, the Wonder Wheel, the open-frame steel relic of the Parachute Jump, the historic Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, and a few remaining old-fashioned penny arcade houses. Signs of Coney’s past funky days are still alive in today’s burlesque and freak shows, the flamboyant “Mermaid Parade,” and the music festivals on the beach. Like the haven and playground of the immigrants and working-class New Yorkers in past decades, Coney’s boardwalk is still today a beloved place for people of all colors, ages, and incomes.
Over the last years, Coney Island has been home to people from about 50 countries, with nearly half the population consisting of recent immigrants.16 As of the 2000 census, there were 51,574 people living in Coney Island: 59.6% were white, 32.4% were black or African American, 17.9% were Hispanic, and 4.5% were Asian. Coney Island is a predominantly low-income neighborhood, with a median household income of $21,654 as of 2009, as opposed to an average $76,800 for New York in the same year.17 The large predominance of a low-income population in the neighborhood is due in large part to the several public housing complexes in the area, including nine New York City Housing Authority projects, containing approximately 4,093 housing units and 9,385 residents. In addition, a large proportion of residents in Coney Island are Section 8 voucher recipients or employ other forms of subsidies to rent or finance their homes.18
As of the 2000 census, 32.9% of all households were below poverty level, with a 12.9% unemployment rate, against an estimated 5.4% for the whole New York City metropolitan area. Census data also shows that the number of impoverished black families moving into the area grew 10 times between 1970 and 1990.19
Coney Island today attracts a predominantly native tourism from Brooklyn and the larger New York metropolitan area. If it’s true that the district’s tourism activity is in part “driven by nostalgia and by the few remaining vestiges of its storied past,”20 Coney Island serves still as the public beach and amusement area for thousands of native New Yorkers who just can’t afford to go elsewhere (Figures 5.4 and 5.5). A mix of white, Hispanic, and African American low- and middle-income families can linger along the boardwalk, bathe in the ocean, or join the free street parades and music shows for the price of a subway ride and a hot dog.
Figure 5.4 Sunbathing at the Coney Island beach in 2014.
Figure 5.5 Food stand along Surf Avenue, 2010.
Until 2008, when the last original amusement park (Astroland) was demolished, the amusement area was managed by a small number of business owners with long-time connections to the neighborhood. In 2008, 75% of the area’s 4,030 businesses had fewer than 5 employees, and almost 90% had fewer than 10.21 It was the clustering of many independent operators that has given the place its unique character: unlike Six Flags, there were no gates at Coney Island, and no general admission tickets.
The social and ethnic diversity of its population and the anarchic palimpsest of its derelict urban fabric, coupled with the relative lack of privatized and controlled spaces, have always allowed for a very peculiar form of tourism at Coney Island, one where visitors could roam freely among rides and attractions without the constraints of corporate rules.22 And the Coney Island boardwalk, with the diversity of its funky historic businesses, has always represented a safe retreat from the homogeneity of the chain-controlled and commodified city.
Amid turbulent ups and downs, the “People’s Playground” has somehow managed to survive over 70 years of relentless attacks by city planning and private development. However, the summer of 2009 marked a turning point for Coney Island, one that was destined to revolutionize its future development for good. On July 29, 2009, the New York City Council approved a rezoning plan that city officials claimed would “bring this beloved icon back to life, renewing Coney Island’s legacy for generations to come.”23 But the plan was controversial: it envisioned the radical demapping of over 61 acres formerly zoned for outdoor amusements and their reduction to about 27 acres. Of these, 15 would be occupied by a combination of high-rise hotels and indoor shopping and entertainment. Only 12 acres would actually be outdoor amusements of the kind recognizable as traditional seaside entertainment.24
The preparatory process for the rezoning had started already in September 2003, when Mayor Bloomberg, the city council, and the Brooklyn borough president formed the Coney Island Development Corporation (CIDC) to produce a development blueprint for the area. The CIDC was created as a subsidiary department of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), the nonprofit local development corporation that is owned and financed by the city and fully controlled by the mayor.
The city’s primary intention was to revitalize Coney Island as a potential site for the 2012 Olympics. However, when the bid for the Olympics was lost to London in July 2005, the CIDC came up with a rezoning scheme that envisioned the conversion of large areas to residential uses to lure high-end residential development into the neighborhood. This draft was later integrated into a comprehensive plan developed by the Department of City Planning (DCP), named the Coney Island Comprehensive Rezoning Plan. According to a statement by city planning commissioner Amanda Burden in 2009, the plan
will preserve amusements in their historic location in perpetuity as Mayor Bloomberg promised. In addition to creating a year-round 27-acre amusement and entertainment district, the plan will also make possible the much needed and long awaited revitalization of the surrounding neighborhood. The plan will reestablish the area as South Brooklyn’s economic engine, bringing new jobs, retail services and affordable housing to the Coney Island community.25
The renderings released in 2009 depicted a landscape dense with spectacular rides and attractions—with just a hint, far away in the horizon, of a cluster of super-tall condominium and hotel towers. Yet, aside from such triumphal representations, the plan dictated a substantial inflation of the residential destination of the area—a use that many see as incompatible with the livelihood of a large amusement district26—and a radical reduction of its outdoor amusements.
The rezoning covers 19 blocks bounded by the New York Aquarium to the east, West 24th Street to the west, Mermaid Avenue to the north, and the Riegelmann Boardwalk to the south. It prescribes the remapping of 9.3 acres zoned for parkland at KeySpan Park, which is to be replaced by two parks along the Riegelmann Boardwalk: a 9.39-acre park for the amusement area, and a 1.41-acre neighborhood park. In the immediate surroundings of the amusement area, the plan foresees hotel towers, indoor amusements, retail, and restaurants. To the north and west of the amusement area, the plan fosters the redevelopment of underutilized land by rezoning it to a mix of residential, service, and retail uses, with the goal of creating 4,500 new units of housing and about 500,000 square feet of new retail. Around 25 high-rise buildings will be scattered throughout the area—to serve them, car parking will be accommodated in multilevel garages that will have to be “wrapped” by active uses (shops, restaurants) on the street frontages to avoid a dull streetscape (Figures 5.6 and 5.7). In an attempt to emulate the carnival feeling of old Coney Island, the Department of City Planning has also insisted on enforcing cosmetic prescriptions to keep street life “vibrant” and to recreate a sense of the “picturesque.” The plan promised to strengthen Coney Island’s “unique character” and adopt specific requirements and restrictions aimed at fostering an active street life: “To promote a vibrant active district … , new developments … would be required to have amusements occupying half of the total street frontage, and the ground floor level of hotels would be required to have active uses such as restaurants, retail and entertainment venues.”27
A new special zoning district was created, called the “Special Coney Island District,” stretching 17 blocks between the New York Aquarium, the Riegelmann Boardwalk, Mermaid Avenue, and West 22nd Street. The special district is regulated by specific prescriptions on density, bulk, and parking and is composed of three subdistricts, each with its own special zoning regulations:
Figure 5.6 Rendering: a rezoned beach, boardwalk, and amusement area at Coney Island.
Figure 5.7 Illustrative development plan.
•Coney East (what today remains of the amusement area) will be rezoned to expand its range of uses, including hotels, enclosed entertainments, retail and restaurants. Hotel towers, whose height will range from 150 to 270 feet, will be allowed on Surf Avenue, in front of the main subway station.
•Coney West (now filled with vacant lots) will be rezoned for residential uses with retail and entertainment uses on the ground floor along Surf Avenue, and amusements and retail along the boardwalk. Residential towers will be allowed along Surf Avenue, with the highest towers at the corners of Surf Avenue and the intersecting streets.
•Coney North/Mermaid Avenue will be rezoned for residential towers with ground-floor retail along Surf Avenue and Mermaid Avenue.
The rezoning has introduced a combination of new residential and commercial uses to Coney Island, including new retail and amenities that will benefit a district whose retail supply is currently very poor.28
But despite the city’s promises of thousands of new jobs and housing units for Coney Island residents, many locals feared they had more to lose than to gain from the proposed plan. According to the city:
The preliminary assessment could not rule out the possibility that the proposed actions would: (1) add a substantial new population with different socioeconomic characteristics compared to the size and character of the existing population, (2) displace uses that have a “blighting” effect on property values in the area; or (3) introduce a substantial amount of a more costly type of housing compared to existing housing.29
The plan allows for the development of around 1,750 housing units in Coney North and roughly 2,700 residential units west of KeySpan Park. Of these, 607 new units would be set as “affordable” housing through the city’s inclusionary zoning program. But the inclusionary zoning bonus, granted to developers who opt to keep aside 20% of their units as “affordable,” has so far proven of little use at Coney Island. Similar programs adopted under the Bloomberg administration in other parts of the city haven’t been utilized by developers in sufficient numbers to create a significant number of affordable units.
Although the environmental statement anticipated an indirect residential displacement of 1,497 residents due to soaring rental prices, no forms of mitigation were deemed necessary, as “a population loss of this magnitude would not substantially alter the demographic composition of the study area.”30 But a 2009 study by the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy revealed, on a low estimate, a loss of at least 3,000 existing units of affordable housing due to expiring rental subsidies and particularly because a large majority (85%) of Section 8 units in the area are currently under contracts that are set to expire over the next few years, and are likely not to be renewed because of upward pressure in the local housing market. The study concludes that “the creation of 607 units—the number of new affordable units in Coney Island anticipated through the city’s inclusionary housing program—will not even begin to mitigate the damage this potential rezoning will have on Coney Island’s residents.”31 Moreover, the increased allowable density as a result of the rezoning is encouraging investors to develop the many “soft sites” (underdeveloped parcels with low-rise buildings, especially concentrated north of Surf Avenue) to their full capacity, thus demolishing the older structures, including what remains of Coney Island’s surviving historic buildings, as occurred in the fall of 2010.
The plan also entirely redefines the role of the amusement industry at Coney Island. While Coney Island has always been primarily an open-air seasonal destination, the plan proposes to transform it into a year-round destination with indoor entertainment. Coney Island has always had multiple independent operators, yet city officials seemed to favor a new management carried out by a single major operator. The indoor amusements that the plan foresees may end up feeling more like Disney’s highly controlled consumption outlets in the new Times Square than the grungy arcade houses of old Coney. The presence of pricey hotels and residential towers will also take its toll in the surrounding public space, where forms of control, noise ordinances, and other regulations will likely be enforced to protect the comfort of new residents. The proposed high-rise hotels could forever transform a skyline currently defined by historic landmarks like the Wonder Wheel and the Parachute Jump. According to a Huffington Post journalist, a cut-down amusement area, overshadowed by soaring high rises, “will be too small to accommodate new, iconic rides and would not leave much space for future generations of visionaries to carry forward Coney Island’s traditions of inventiveness and artistry.”32
But despite dozens of heated public hearings and the clear “no” of local activists, Coney Island enthusiasts, and historic preservationists, the plan was hastily approved without significant modifications from its original layout on July 29, 2009.
Shortly before the first rezoning drafts were released in September 2005, Joseph J. Sitt, a real estate tycoon with strong political connections in the neighborhood,33 and CEO of development firm Thor Equities, purchased the 168,000-square-foot Washington Bath House lot west of the current amusement area for $13 million. Owning property that was now potentially earmarked for rezoning to residential uses, Sitt flipped it the same year to Taconic Investment Partners for $90 million—for a thick $77 million profit.34 Between 2003 and 2006, Thor Equities proceeded to purchase almost every piece of property (about 10 acres) inside the traditional amusement area: in the winter of 2007 and then again in 2008, the developer evicted dozens of small businesses and ride operators, and swiftly purchased the largest remaining amusement park at Coney Island, Astroland. The park, which had opened in 1962, closed at the end of 2008: a few weeks later, rides were dismantled and sold (Figure 5.8).35
Figure 5.8 Ticket booths standing in a desolate wasteland, Coney Island, 2008.
Thor Equities’ real plans for Coney have always been unclear, especially since they have changed so much from year to year. In 2005, when the economy was booming, Thor released dazzling renderings of a resort area sporting luxury high-rise condo towers with the promise to bring a Vegas-style development to South Brooklyn.36 Four years later, in the midst of the 2009 recession, Thor presented new designs that included what seemed to be a small gated amusement park, featuring high-rise hotels and large retail stores. Thor Equities’ requests to the city to boost the maximum retail size limit in the rezoning plan from 2,500 to 10,000 square feet led many critics to assume that the developer intended to turn the area into a megamall on the ocean. In reality, many questioned Thor Equities’ intentions of actually building anything at Coney Island—a bias that came from his reputation of acquiring property, requiring zoning changes, and then flipping the land to other developers for a profit. This is exactly what Thor had done during the first Bloomberg administration with the Albee Square Mall site in downtown Brooklyn, which he purchased for $25 million in 2001 and resold post-rezoning in 2004 to Arcadia Realty Trust and MacFarlane Partners for five times the amount.37
In November 2008, the city started negotiations to reacquire some of the land from Joe Sitt to go on with its plans. They offered the developer $110 million for the parcels required for the plans of a nine-acre outdoor amusement district. Sitt declined and reportedly demanded double the amount.38 After lengthy negotiations, in November 2009, the city finally negotiated to purchase the land from Thor Equities for an astounding $95.6 million deal. According to the New York Times, “while Mr. Sitt got much less than the $140 million he had wanted for 10.5 of the 12.5 acres he owned, the $95.6 million for 6.9 acres came to more than $300 a square foot,”39 an amount comparable to that of certain Manhattan areas. After the land was finally purchased in December 2009, the city issued a request for proposals for an interim amusement operator (on a 10-year lease) to run a temporary park on the now city-owned property: the bid was won by Zamperla Group, which also operates Victorian Gardens in Central Park and has cooperated with amusement parks around the globe, including Disney, Universal Studios, and Six Flags. The NYCEDC offered the company far more favorable leasing conditions than any other locally owned business in Coney Island had ever enjoyed. A 10-year lease was signed for a $100,000 annual rent plus a reported 10% of the gross profit in the first year of operation: “To put this number in perspective, consider that Boardwalk businesses like Ruby’s and Cha Cha’s have been paying $100,000 annual rent in recent years,”40 notes the Amusing the Zillion blog.
In the summer of 2010, four giant pinwheels and crescent moons reminiscent of the long-gone Luna Park were put into place by the front gate of a brand-new amusement park, whose 19 rides, although state of the art, have a nostalgic allure to them (Figure 5.9). The cheerful opening of “Luna Park” on Memorial Day 2010 was such an overwhelming success that Central Amusement International (CAI, of which Zamperla is majority shareholder) promptly scheduled to open another $12 million expansion in the adjacent lots before the summer of 2011.41
Figure 5.9 Rides at Luna Park by Zamperla, 2014.
But good times were not to last: just a few weeks after the opening of the new park, Thor Equities started to demolish most of the remaining historical buildings in Coney Island’s amusement zone: the Henderson’s Music Hall (built in the late 1880s, it had been renovated in 2004 and was the last surviving example of the music halls that thrived at Coney Island at the turn of the century), the Bank of Coney Island (a 1923 neoclassical revival building that testified to Coney’s past prosperity), and the Shore Hotel (built in 1903 and Coney Island’s last operational hotel) were all razed to the ground in a matter of weeks.42
Thor Equities’ wave of demolitions started a few months after the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation had issued a determination that Coney Island’s amusement district met the criteria for inclusion on the State and National Register of Historic Places, naming each of these endangered structures as the district’s “key buildings.”43 However, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission denied them landmark designation and refused the creation of a historic district at Coney Island. The idea of a “Coney Island Historic District”—a two-block-long corridor along Surf Avenue that would preserve some of these historic structures—was proposed by preservation and advocacy groups including the Municipal Arts Society, the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the Historic Districts Council, Coney Island USA, and Save Coney Island. The designation of the area as a historic district would have provided tax incentives to rehabilitate these historic buildings. But the Landmarks Preservation Commission, whose chair is directly appointed by the mayor, played a long waiting game at Coney Island and didn’t calendar any of the buildings until 2010,44 long after all properties of Thor Equities had been reduced to rubble. Aside from the iconic Cyclone Roller Coaster,45 the Wonder Wheel,46 and the Parachute Jump,47 only one historical building outside of the amusement area has survived the wrecking ball: the Shore Theater, a neo-Renaissance theater built in the 1920s and boarded up since the late 1970s, which was given landmark status in December 2010.
Thor Equities’ rush to demolition was part of a strategy that has become routine in today’s New York: to head off the lengthy landmarking process and take full advantage of the potential that comes with rezoning (in this case, the plan allows for 30-story high-rise hotels), small-scale historical buildings are easily sacrificed to pave the way for more profitable development. In the Bloomberg years, thousands of historical buildings were demolished each year—usually right before or right after rezoning plans were getting final approval. During the 2002–2006 building boom, the number of demolition permits rose from 3,386 in 2002 to a record 6,480 in 2006.48
In a TV interview on NY1,49 Thor Equities CEO Joe Sitt declared: “Every one of these buildings is just horrible, rundown relics with nothing exciting about them.”50 In reality, most of these buildings had great potential and were open for business before Thor Equities’ acquisition led to the eviction of tenants and businesses in 2008 and 2009. After demolition, the developer promptly released vague renderings of one-story retail boxes, reminiscent of a suburban strip mall, which would replace the old buildings. The New York Observer claimed that Thor’s renderings were “almost designed to inspire distaste,” with “a Burger King-like joint on the corner, next to a taco restaurant with signage highly suggestive of Taco Bell.”51
“This is a tale of two Coney Islands,” claimed advocacy group Save Coney Island:
Luna Park is laying the groundwork for an exciting summer, while a block away Thor is planning to lay waste to Coney Island’s heritage, threatening to ruin all at once the area’s past, present, and future. The Bloomberg administration needs to decide: Will this summer be remembered as the beginning of Coney Island’s rebirth? Or will be remembered as the summer that the City allowed an opportunistic developer to demolish Coney Island’s history?52
But as Thor Equities’ demolitions in Coney Island continued, worse was yet to come: on the day after the 2010 season ended, almost all remaining boardwalk businesses, some of which were in place for over 40 years, received immediate eviction notices, this time from the executives of CAI/Zamperla, who ran the newly built Luna Park: “They didn’t have the vision that we have for the Boardwalk…. It’s a business decision,” said Zamperla’s CEO.53 Local businesses like the bizarre Shoot the Freak and legendary food joints and bars like Ruby’s, Cha Cha’s, Paul’s Daughter, Grill House, Gyro Corner, Beer Island, and Pio Pio Riko all had two weeks to vacate the premises they had occupied for decades. Some of them united in a lengthy legal battle to have their leases renewed for at least one more year. In 2012, only two of them, Paul’s Daughter (which had opened at Coney as Gregory & Paul’s Diner in 1962) and Ruby’s Bar, were offered eight-year leases with the stipulation that they invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in the rehabilitation of their stores.54
The word “preservation” seems ironic in a neighborhood that has experienced so much demolition.55
In 2009, a Huffington Post reporter wrote that, with the adoption of the Coney Island rezoning plan, Mayor Bloomberg was finally “on the cusp of completing the work of Moses and Trump.”56 As a matter of fact, it was the very city-initiated planning process for Coney Island that sparked the frenzy of land speculation that has ravaged the amusement district and most of its historical landmarks over the last few years. Once it appeared that the zoning status quo would change, Thor Equities cleared land to pave the way for higher returns. Between 2007 and 2010, most of the remaining historical buildings at Coney Island were obliterated, while the old amusement district was reduced to a fraction of its former size. However, while Thor Equities has been largely responsible for the blighting of present-day Coney Island, it is the city’s plan that poses the greatest danger to the amusement district’s future: “Coney Island’s amusement district has survived the pressures of the New York City real estate market thanks to its special amusement-only zoning. Land that is rezoned to allow for other uses, however, will be lost to amusements forever,” a reporter claims.57 As of today, the outdoor amusements at Coney Island occupy around 3 acres. Before the plan’s approval, over 61 acres were still zoned for outdoor amusements, while the legendary Coney Island of the past had over 100 acres of parkland, including rides, arcades, bathhouses, hotels, houses, and retail. The approved rezoning plan shrinks the amusement area in perpetuum. Only the opening of Zamperla’s new Luna Park has managed to counterbalance some of the losses accumulated in such a short time.
The plan was presented as the city’s response to Coney Island’s chronic decline. By accommodating new housing, retail, and entertainment, and by bringing in new jobs, the plan promised to “ensure that future generations can enjoy an open, affordable, urban 21st century Coney Island that does justice to its illustrious history and enduring appeal.”58 However, the plan has failed to address the demands of local residents and businesses, and to recognize Coney Island’s key potential as a large-scale, diversified amusement district that honors its past glories. While opening up the doors to new injections of capital may generate new jobs for locals in the hotel, retail and food service industry, the ripple effects of such a massive upzoning in an overwhelmingly impoverished community are also representing a serious threat to the livelihood of local residents and businesses.
The plan … is the product of over 300 public meetings with numerous stakeholders, ranging from elected officials, residents, property and business owners, to Coney Island enthusiasts from New York City and beyond.59
The plan has been presented as the result of an intensive public outreach process. In reality, many residents, grassroots organizations, and advocacy groups claim that their voices and proposals have fallen on deaf ears. Activist groups Save Coney Island60 and Coney Island USA, the Municipal Art Society, and even the New York Times on many occasions urged the city to expand the amusement area and to remove four high-rise towers from the heart of the amusement district; Coney Island’s Community Board 13 also recommended the relocation of the hotel towers, while the New York Landmarks Conservancy and the Historic Districts Council pushed for the preservation of some of Coney’s historical buildings. All of their requests remained unanswered: despite dozens of public hearings, none of the several civic coalitions opposing the rezoning or asking for amendments has been able to substantially affect the plan.
The plan will reestablish the area as South Brooklyn’s economic engine, bringing new jobs, retail services and affordable housing to the Coney Island community.61
To create affordable housing, the plan provides incentives to developers who decide to set off 20% of the developed units as “affordable.” Of the thousand housing units proposed, 607 units would be designated as affordable to households making up to 80% of the area median income (AMI; in New York City, the AMI for a family of four in 2009 was $70,900). However, the median household income in this part of Coney Island, at $22,315 in 2009,62 is nowhere near these numbers: as a result, the rezoning isn’t likely to produce much housing that is actually affordable to Coney Island locals. Moreover, since the inclusionary zoning tool applied in this rezoning plan is voluntary, it is questionable how many of these “affordable” units will ever be built.
According to the city, by the time of the rezoning, about one-quarter of the housing stock in the rezoned area was subsidized housing, with 42% of the rental units being subsidized and 34% having some form of rent regulation.63 The presence of so many affordable units served to justify the plan’s focus on high-end, market-rate residential development. But subsidized units do not exist in perpetuity, and as rental contracts expire, upward pressures on the market incentivize landlords to opt out of subsidy programs and to convert their units into market-rate housing, as we have already seen happening in Harlem and elsewhere across the city. As a case in point, in the summer of 2007, two years before the rezoning was adopted, all Mitchell-Lama64 units in the Trump Village mega housing complex east of Coney’s amusement area were converted to pricey market-rate apartments. The same year, several other Mitchell-Lama buildings in the area were converted to market-rate housing, including Ocean Towers, a 360-unit development that was sold for $5.9 million to Cammeby’s International in 2007 and has been recently resold to Proto Property Services and Community Development Trust for $35.6 million, seven times the price.65 In an effort to halt the loss of affordable units, in November 2009, city officials announced a $21 million deal to renovate the Luna Park housing complex (one of the state’s biggest Mitchell-Lama developments, which houses around 6,000 people in almost 1,600 apartments) under an agreement that will keep the apartments in the Mitchell-Lama program for 20 more years.66
Meanwhile, on September 8, 2011, the city council approved a luxury 415-unit, mixed-use project on two vacant parcels on the western end of Riegelmann Boardwalk, nine blocks west of the Coney Island Special District. The 428,000-square-foot project, known as Ocean Dreams, would include three residential towers with 415 market-rate condos, ranging from 14 to 22 stories; 418 parking spaces; and up to 24,750 square feet of commercial space. The same year, private beachfront condominiums were under construction on the Coney Island boardwalk at West 32nd Street, with sales prices ranging from $510,000 for a one-bedroom to $1.55 million for a penthouse.67
One housing development with an affordable housing component that has been completed in the rezoned area is called Coney Island Commons. The housing complex was presented by the city in early 2013 as a response to the displacement caused by Hurricane Sandy, which hit the shore of Coney Island on October 29, 2012. The city announced that residents displaced from their homes because of the storm could have access to affordable housing units in the new mixed-use development via a lottery organized by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). Storm victims were given a 25% preference in the lottery. Completed at the end of 2013, it consists of two residential buildings plus a 40,000-square-foot YMCA, and has a total of 195 units—39 of which are reserved for the displaced. The remaining 156 apartments will be affordable to households earning up to 60% of AMI—equal to an income of $49,800 per year for a family of four.
In early 2015, rumors were out that the tallest building south of downtown Brooklyn would rise in place of a low-rise strip mall on Neptune Avenue, north of the amusement area. The $450 million, 40-story tower would include 544 market-rate apartments and three levels of retail space.68 The architectural renderings showed a Whole Foods, a Gap, a Ralph Lauren, and a Duane Reade in the ground-floor mall.69
Through the development of year-round uses and job opportunities for the residents, [the plan seeks to] facilitate the economic revitalization of the peninsula.70
On paper, the Coney Island rezoning is meant to “enhance and protect existing uses and previously existing uses.”71 But the plan doesn’t include any serious strategy aimed at preserving locally owned retail and at avoiding the forced relocation of local businesses. Despite anticipating the displacement of a few dozen small retailers, the city deemed mitigations unnecessary, claiming that “the proposed actions would re-introduce similar businesses with similar products and services, catering to both a residential and visitor consumer population.”72
Many businesses along the Surf and Mermaid Avenue corridors will be directly displaced by the rezoning. As these small businesses get evicted, most of the new tenants will likely be large companies that can afford higher rents. This is already happening along Surf Avenue, where chains are gradually replacing the old arcades and food joints. Other small local stores in the area will be threatened with indirect displacement, as many are located in single-story buildings that claim only a fraction of maximum allowable density allowed under the rezoning—an incentive for investors and landlords to demolish them to build denser and taller structures. Most of these businesses are small local stores, including car workshops and bodegas catering to the existing community near the amusement district.
The plan seeks to … facilitate the development of a vibrant year round, 27-acre urban amusement and entertainment district … laying the groundwork for the development of a 12-acre urban amusement park preserving and expanding amusement uses in their historic boardwalk location in perpetuity.73
In early 2007, the Municipal Art Society (MAS), a New York–based urban think tank, launched the initiative Imagine Coney, which included a public call for ideas and workshops with international experts and amusement industry leaders, to craft a more sustainable vision for development at Coney Island and to emphasize the potential of Coney’s amusement industry as a crucial engine for growth in the area. In a testimony for the City Planning Commission in May 2009, the MAS highlighted several key points for development at Coney Island, which included an expansion of the outdoor amusement area to 27 acres by retaining the existing zoning code (amusement only) to allow for future growth—an indispensable step to make Coney Island able to compete with other world-class amusement parks; safeguarding Coney Island’s architectural heritage through the aggressive preservation of historical buildings; and introducing regulations to keep large-scale, generic retail out of the amusement district.74 The MAS’s recommendations were in support of a different, more imaginative approach to redevelopment, one that focused on the amusement area as an economic engine for the area and as a provider of quality jobs. But the city vigorously dismissed the call for a larger amusement area. In 2008, city planning chief Amanda Burden warned the public against raising any further objections: “It is imperative that the rezoning process and timeline not be jeopardized by any reconsideration of our proposed rezoning boundaries or urban design parameters…. It is imperative that this rezoning proceeds expeditiously, otherwise the Coney Island amusement area that we know and love will cease to exist.”75
The MAS’s testimony emphasizes the underlying contradictions of a plan that claims to capitalize on the legendary “brand” of Coney Island while at the same time radically scaling down its prime vocation as a world-class amusement park. In 2015, the de Blasio administration announced new plans to take six privately owned lots by condemnation to complete its 2009 plans for a “Wonder Wheel Way,” a pedestrian promenade that will connect the three remaining historical landmarks of Coney Island: the Cyclone Roller Coaster, the Wonder Wheel, and the Parachute Jump. More rides and attractions along this stretch will fall victim to this development plan, including the horror-themed Ghost Hole ride at 12th Street and Bowery, and the old-fashioned High Striker. According to Save Coney Island spokesman Juan Rivero: “There are numerous places around the globe that have built glorious parks that pay tribute to Coney Island. Here, where we have the original, the city has been all too happy to shrink it out of existence.”76 The theme park industry has one of its most legendary progenitors at Coney Island: still today, hundreds of parks around the world are inspired by the former magnificence of Coney. Luna Park, in Melbourne, Australia, features a giant entrance gate inspired by the iconic face of George C. Tylou, who founded Steeplechase Park in 1897. Coney Island Park in the Cincinnati area features a range of classic rides that pay tribute to the legend of Coney Island. Full-size replicas of Coney’s Wonder Wheel stand in Disney’s California Adventure Park and in Yokahama Park in Japan.
Fortunately, the constant additions of new rides at Zamperla’s Luna Park have managed to keep the park vibrant and crowded over the last seasons. In the summer of 2010, thanks to the opening of the new park, the number of visitors to Coney Island tripled to 12.8 million compared to rezoning-year 2009.77 Although small if compared with the 27 acres that the MAS had called for, Luna Park has become the main catalyst for visitors and locals in a renewed Coney Island. With its entrance reminiscent of the original 1903 Luna Park, it has a general admission ticket in the form of credits (Luna cards) or unlimited ride wristbands. Over the last years, the park has been adding new attractions, from a ride inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machines in 2013 to a fancy revisitation of the iconic Thunderbolt in 2014. For the 2011 season, the park expanded with a new addition called Scream Zone, which hosts the first new roller coasters built in New York since the opening of the Cyclone in 1927.
On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy carved a path of devastation along Brooklyn’s southern shoreline, ravaging the Coney Island waterfront and destroying innumerable businesses and houses on the peninsula. All businesses along the boardwalk and on Stillwell and Mermaid Avenues were flooded and severely damaged. A few days after the mayhem, it seemed like Coney Island had gone back to its darkest days: gangs were seen looting liquor stores, pharmacies, and even private homes in what seemed like an eerie postapocalyptic landscape of fallen street signs, mud, and sewer waters.
While the largest amusement operators managed to swiftly repair the damages to their rides, most poor residents and small business owners didn’t recover so quickly:78 too many didn’t possess flood insurance as it was too expensive or impossible for them to get. Over a quarter of the approximately 50,000 residents in the neighborhood suffered severe damage to their houses and properties, according to FEMA. The feds spent $44 million for temporary homes for evacuated residents, or for repair jobs on the properties that could be repaired,79 while the city managed to funnel $72 million in federal aid to small businesses—a drop in the water considering that over 18,000 businesses that employed at least 200,000 workers were hit by the storm.80
A few months after Sandy, in the summer of 2013, it seemed like life was back to normal in the amusement area and along the beach and the boardwalk, which were again bustling with visitors. But things weren’t as rosy just a few blocks away, in the poor residential areas north of the waterfront, where a real recovery was still to be seen. Many small businesses unable to get assistance or loans from the city had shut their doors for good after the storm; many others were struggling to stay open.
If there is a lesson to be learned after Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans in 2005, it is that natural disasters can pave the way for development of a kind that would have been unthinkable before the tragedy. In 2013, the Bloomberg administration and the NYCEDC managed to funnel about $90 million in federal money for recovery to be used in five storm-impacted city areas, including Coney Island. But these funds are not for small businesses of the kind that populated the streets of Coney Island, and most mom-and-pops battered by the storm won’t stand to benefit: the funds are dedicated to large “transformational projects” of the kind that only top developers can bring.81 Yet another example of Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalism” in action: in the years following Sandy, struggling small businesses have been shutting down or leaving in droves, clearing the ground for an invasion of Manhattan-like corporate retail in Coney Island (Figures 5.10 and 5.11). Shortly after Sandy, new franchises started popping up at every corner, including a new Applebee’s and an IT’Sugar candy store in Thor Equities’ retail building along Surf Avenue, adding to the already-present Popeye’s and Dunkin’ Donuts in the Stillwell Avenue Terminal. In 2014 and 2015, new food franchises opened along Surf Avenue, including Florida-based burger chain Checkers, a Subway Cafe, and New York–based pizzeria chain Grimaldi’s, turning Surf Avenue into a real “Mecca for franchises.”82More chains moved into the neighborhood in 2015, including New York City’s first Wahlburgers, and rumors have it that Pizza Hut and LA-born frozen yogurt franchise Red Mango will soon have their spots on Coney Island’s “franchise restaurant row.”83
Figure 5.10 IT’Sugar candy store along Surf Avenue, 2014.
Figure 5.11 Nets Shop by Adidas, Stillwell Avenue, 2014.
Meanwhile, another change came in 2015 to threaten the character of Coney Island: in several nearby areas of the Brooklyn shoreline, including Brighton Beach, the Parks Department started replacing sections of the wooden Boardwalk with synthetic walkways made of recycled plastic lumber and a 10-foot-wide concrete lane for emergency vehicles in the middle. The $10 million pilot project, which was launched by the Bloomberg administration in 2009,84 was presented after Sandy as an ecological alternative for a more resilient boardwalk. The plans are to soon extend the works to Coney’s famous 2.5-mile-long Riegelmann Boardwalk. But this decision isn’t sitting all too well with Coney Islanders.85 The tropical hardwood zig-zagging boardwalk not only has been a symbol of Coney Island for over 80 years, but also has shown its resiliency by withstanding the destructive force of Sandy much better than those sections remade in recycled plastic and concrete along other waterfront areas. Residents expressed their frustration at community meetings, and local councilman Mark Treyger tried to convince the Landmarks Commission to give the Riegelmann Boardwalk landmark status. But their input was received with indifference.86
De Blasio failed to respond to the concerns of local councilpersons and the community, and the new administration sees no problem in going ahead with Bloomberg’s plan, to the great disappointment of those who had believed the new mayor was the anti-Bloomberg. By the end of 2015, several sections of the boardwalk on the Brooklyn southern shore had already been remade in recycled plastic and concrete.
Ironically, piles of the same wood that New York City wanted removed were sent 4,000 miles away to create a walkway inside the $60 million USA Pavilion at the 2015 Milan Expo.87 Other stacks of wood from the famous boardwalk were sold or given away by contractors to be used as upscale wall coverings in a West Village restaurant, as floors in the Barnes Foundation’s new museum in Philadelphia, and even as high-end design lounge chairs: an ironic turn of events that seems to epitomize the ability of branding to create value out of nothing, and to turn even public losses into private profit. This is something I will dig deeper into in the next chapter.