Threatened Community Gardens
Brooklyn Independent Television
After our look at the historical Coney Island amusement park, a turn-of-the-century icon of American entertainment, it is only fitting to present the 1917 comedy short Coney Island. This film stars Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and his then-partner Buster Keaton, but is as notable for both The Great Stone Face's emoting and its scenery of Coney Island.
The time has come. We've gone live with our new GL site, gowanuslounge.com. Please reset your bookmarks or get used to typing in gowanuslounge.com and leaving out the blogspot. Most important, please, please, please reset your RSS feed. We apologize for this one-time inconvenience and really hope you'll stay with it. We think the new look is better and easier to read and give us a lot more functionality. GL will still be here, but other than reminders to move, we won't be putting up new posts here. The archives, of course, will remain, but we've also migrated them, in full, to the new site.
Coney Island historian Charles Denson was shocked to hear, in a phone call the night before the Times piece ran, that the city was switching gears. "The original plan was a compromise, and I supported that completely," says Denson. "In exchange for saving the amusement area, they were allowing 5,000 condos at the outer edge. Now it's such a reversal --although it does preserve a small amusement area, it's so completely different from what they'd initially proposed that you have to wonder what's going on behind the scenes."
All New And Improved Blog!
You probably didn't even know this existed, did you?
It's been years since anyone updated this, but I'm going to jump back into things now, with a series of updates about our building project. As reported in the news, we here at Coney Island USA bought our building last year and we're starting the renovations necessary to move into the storefronts on Surf Ave. It's not a huge project by the standards of most businesses, but it's a pretty big step for us and it's going to make a HUGE difference on Surf Ave. and to the Museum.
I guess one of the problems with working in a cave-like office with no windows or climate control deep in the bowels of an old building in Coney Island is that you forget how little the people outside actually know about what you're doing.
That's why this blog is such a great idea.
The project is expected to be completed by mid-May with a grand opening party. The new expansion will give the museum and Freak Bar a bigger presence on the street to draw in the crowds. Also new will be the Coney Island Lager on tap, along with a few new sideshow beers, as well as brand new merchandise for sale at the giftshop.
Entry categories: Feature, Short, Documentary Feature, Documentary Short, Experimental, Silent Film, Animation, Music Video.
The Coney Island Film Festival is open to filmmakers working in ALL GENRES, SUBJECTS AND FORMATS.
For all the info visit the Coney Island Film Festival website.
Come out and celebrate the 2008 season with us, as we kick off the summer with a big blowout at the Angel Orensanz Foundation. See mermaids, burlesque performers, and practitioners of the sideshow arts while helping support Coney Island USA, the not-for-profit that produces the Mermaid Parade, the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, Burlesque at the Beach and that operates the Coney Island Museum.
On May 21, we'll be celebrating the 4th Annual Coney Island USA Spring Gala with popcorn, cotton candy, silent auction the Mini-Mermaid Parade and some of the best and craziest performers that New York City has to offer. We'll be putting the "fun" back into fundraising!
April 17, 2008
Dear friends and residents of Coney Island:
From the moment we started drafting the City’s comprehensive plans for the rezoning and redevelopment of Coney Island, we have maintained there are certain core principles that are critical to the success of any Coney Island plan:
- Long term preservation of a vibrant amusement district is paramount, and the mapping of such a district as parkland is necessary to ensure its viability
- Property owners in Coney Island have to be invested in the success of
this plan along with the City
- We must take active steps to help transform Coney Island into a year-round destination, and enclosed amusements and entertainment retail are essential to this transformation
- The plan must provide an integrated development vision for the entire neighborhood – not only the amusement core in Coney East, but also Coney North and Coney West – and create real opportunities for new housing and economic development
While the zoning framework we announced last Fall was a detailed and thoughtful realization of these core principles (and many more), we said from the outset that it was also a work in progress and that we would continue to work with Coney Island’s elected officials, community leaders, land owners and residents to ensure that the final plan was the best it could possibly be.
I am pleased, therefore, to be able to update you on some recent modest adjustments to the Coney Island zoning framework that have both strengthened our finalized plans and will help to move this critically important project toward completion. This revised framework represents an extremely strong foundation for Coney Island’s revitalization and we are excited about now moving forward with it through the public review process.
While we will be sharing much more detailed information with you and other Coney Island stakeholders soon, we wanted to share just a few brief updates on some of these modifications:
- We have increased development opportunities for enclosed amusements and year-round entertainment retail uses
- To accommodate this increased development, while still preserving a major amusement district and enabling us to develop a world class amusement park, we have decreased the size of the new mapped parkland from 15 to 9 acres
- We have created the opportunity for existing land owners – such as long time Coney Island boosters like the Vourderis family, owners of the Wonder Wheel – to develop their properties
Along with these positive changes, we have maintained our commitment to the fundamental aspects of the Coney Island plan, such as the need to create additional active, exciting, year-round entertainment-related uses in Coney East and prevent the district from becoming a generic seaside shopping mall; our steadfast belief that residential housing is not appropriate for the amusement district; and a continued effort to limit higher-density hotels and taller structures to the areas along Surf Avenue, away from the Boardwalk.
As you can see, while some details have been altered in our quest to make this plan a reality, what hasn’t changed is our commitment to our core principles and our overall vision for what Coney Island should – and shouldn’t – be as we secure its long term well-being.
We are proud that we are already receiving positive feedback from key stakeholders on our recent efforts – for example, as you will note in the attached article, Councilman Domenic Recchia, Borough President Marty Markowitz and key landowners such as Dennis Vourderis told the NY Times that they were “optimistic” and believed the City “was headed in the right direction” – and we look forward to bringing you up to date with additional information in the near future.
Sincerely,
Lynn Kelly
The revised plan is the result of meetings with local property owners and others since November.
But in a departure from the original plan unveiled in November by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, those owners would be able to develop the remaining parts of their property themselves as long as they followed the city’s master plan, which must still undergo an environmental review and a land-use review.
“I’m guardedly optimistic,” said Jesse Masyr, a real estate lawyer for Thor Equities, which has been at loggerheads with the Bloomberg administration. “We have to look at the size of sites we have left and what we could build.”“We’re optimistic,” Mr. Vourderis said. “We’re hoping that they’re going to let us develop our own roperties.”
The “stars may finally be realigning,” said Brooklyn’s borough president, Marty Markowitz, a longtime advocate of revitalizing Coney Island.
There are more details to the changes, but it's safe to characterize them as a major reversal in that it would cut the amusement park envisioned by the original proposal by nearly half and would allow hotels along Surf Avenue.
This discussion can be followed on the Coney Island USA message board.
City’s Coney Island Design Revised to Break Deadlock [The New York Times]
City Makes Huge Change to Its Coney Plan [The Gowanus Lounge]
There's a reason gamblers who bet on races could hardly believe their good fortune when the Otis Company installed one of its elevators as an attraction at Coney Island in the early 1900s. Seems with a pair of binoculars, they could look over at nearby Gravesend Racetrack, spot the winners, and place their bets on them before the bookies got the news of how the races came out.
The coaster was purchased from the World's Fair and moved to Coney Island in 1940. The track, if you want to call it that, is a half pipe and the cars run down the half pipe, banking on the curves and gaining speed. The cars are in a train similar to other roller coasters. The Bobsled was shuttered in 1974 and subsequently demolished in 1975.
OSHA cited the company for alleged safety and health violations at two Pennsylvania carnival sites, with proposed fines totaling $62,000, including one incident in which an employee fell from the top of a ride.
Will Astroland be open again in the years to come?
“Unless there’s an interim plan to establish Astroland here for another three to five years,” said Carol Hill Albert, Astroland’s current lessee and former co-owner, “I don’t see how we can.”
Both cops were listed in stable condition with mostly bruises and lacerations from broken glass, authorities said. The driver of the car was believed to have suffered some broken ribs.
Sources said the cops were racing to assist housing cops nearby who had radioed for help to control a melee on Mermaid Ave.
As they were whipping down Surf Ave. about 6:30 p.m., the officers swerved to avoid hitting another car, sending their own out-of-control vehicle into the air.