{"id":251737,"date":"2025-09-24T18:50:20","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T18:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/251737\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T18:50:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T18:50:20","slug":"the-coney-is-probably-dead-coney-island-is-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/251737\/","title":{"rendered":"The Coney Is (Probably) Dead. Coney Island Is Not."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Could <\/p>\n

\n Could be dead.
\n Photo: The Coney\n <\/p>\n

Outside the Coney Island YMCA on September 10, the crowd was not quite at July beach levels<\/a>, but it sure wasn\u2019t quiet. It looked like most of the people waiting in line were in favor of the Coney, the casino-hotel-mall project up for discussion that night, with \u201cYES\u201d signs and T-shirts highly visible. Inside the room, though, the power shifted. The anti-casino speakers were mostly on one side of the room, the pro-casino group on the other, as if at a particularly hostile wedding, and they seemed about evenly split. Something like 500 people \u2014 my unofficial estimate \u2014 had shown up, and more than 150 signed up to speak. The evening was the last formal chance for community members to make their feelings public about the development proposal led by Joe Sitt\u2019s company Thor Equities, in partnership with several other groups, including the Chickasaw Nation.<\/p>\n

In the first hour or so, most of the pro-casino people said their bit and left; their talking points were uniform and matter-of-fact, about creating jobs and bringing more people to the area. All the passion, with few exceptions, was coming from the antis. One of those folks told me \u2014 and it was reported elsewhere, too, and seemingly caught on an audio recording<\/a> \u2014 that a lot of the pro-casino speakers had been paid with $80 gift cards in exchange for making some noise. As the evening lengthened, though, the room grew more and more unified in opposition. There was talk of traffic snarls and strain on the power grid. (The Belt Parkway is already at capacity, and the neighborhood had its share of blackouts this summer<\/a>.) Quite a few people talked about adding gambling to a neighborhood that already has its share of addiction problems.<\/p>\n

Until Monday, it seemed the development money might win out as usual. The required city rezoning had passed<\/a> earlier this year, allowing the project extra height and more space, and it included closure of the block of Stillwell Avenue leading to the boardwalk plus a few other stretches of street. But the winds have shifted. Early this week, three of the six members of the local committee that will rule on the casino\u2014Councilmember Justin Brannan,\u00a0 Borough President Antonio Reynoso, Assemblymember Alex Brook-Krasny, and State Senator Jessica Scarcella-Spanton\u2014declared that they were voting \u201cno.\u201d Another, Marissa Solomon, had already said she\u2019s against it. A two-thirds majority is required, so that\u2019s enough, with an insurance vote, to sink this thing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

It was not a foregone conclusion. Although Brannan had earlier stated his opposition, he\u2019d grown more opaque about his intentions over the summer, saying he\u2019d let the process play out, and he\u2019d voted for the rezoning. There was some speculation that he\u2019d been pushed to flip his vote<\/a>. Nobody was quite sure about Reynoso\u2019s stance either. Now that they\u2019re established on the \u201cno\u201d side, only a real late-September surprise will resuscitate the scheme. (The last of the Manhattan casino proposals, for the East River site south of the U.N., was also voted down<\/a> on Monday. That leaves five proposals, or four if you cross off Coney Island.) The official, final licensing vote<\/a> will follow in December.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a good turn of events, because from any viewpoint except a casino developer\u2019s, the Coney is a project for another place and time. The renderings and other filings show us a structure about three blocks long with a 40-story hotel tower, with a casino and mall below, the latter containing about 70,000 square feet of dining and retail. \u00a0A retail complex under a hotel-casino, especially, seems like a retrograde idea. Adding a mall to anything in 2025, with pressure from Amazon on one side and yawning volumes of empty stores on the other, seems like strapping lead weights to an airplane before it takes off. By way of comparison, northern New Jersey\u2019s American Dream \u2014 a mall that itself includes a roller coaster \u2014 is yet again in a fight for solvency<\/a>. And that giant project is even in a place with vast amounts of parking, wide-open access by car, and a suburban clientele eager to spend the day shopping. Coney Island has none of those. It is not hard to envision a situation where, in a few years, we\u2019d be left with an underused, rapidly going-to-seed mall propped up by the casino\u2019s tables and slots. Then what? The mall fills up with crappy weed shops and keychain hawkers; underfunding means the maintenance slips; eventually, maybe, there\u2019s a bankruptcy, followed by a long twilight as an eyesore.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n From left: <\/strong>Photo: The ConeyPhoto: The Coney\n <\/p>\n

\n From top: <\/strong>Photo: The ConeyPhoto: The Coney\n <\/p>\n

The one semi-persuasive case that anyone was able to summon for the Coney \u2014 and the most persuasive one, at least to me \u2014 was the \u201cget it done already\u201d argument. As I\u2019ve noted in a past column<\/a>, we\u2019ve seen more than a half-century of people shaking their heads over the crumbling state of Coney Island. Given that it\u2019s mid-Atlantic waterfront property on a barrier island with a good wide beach and a boardwalk, within reach of cheap public transportation, it should be competitive with Jones Beach or Long Beach Island or Point Pleasant. There was quite a bit of housing built there in the 1960s, both by private entities and by NYCHA, but for the next two decades Coney Island became a zone where plans went to die. You could see that inertia manifest in the Shore Theater<\/a>, the century-old moviehouse and office building across from Nathan\u2019s. It\u2019s been ripe for restoration since the 1970s and has sat, empty and disintegrating, for most of that time. \u201cThey really ought to do something there\u201d was the neighborhood\u2019s mantra.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, though, that\u2019s an outsider\u2019s view, one that\u2019s increasingly out of date. Spend a little time there, and you can see that the neighborhood, despite a variety of persistent problems, is not the declining, desperate area it was a generation ago. A visitor dropping in from 1995 would be astonished by how much has been built. Maimonides (formerly MCU and KeySpan) Park, home to the Brooklyn Cyclones, now somehow 25 years old, has been well maintained and got a freshening-up last year; it\u2019s a real success story. The dumpy old Abe Stark Sports Center, the ice rink on the boardwalk between 19th and 20th Streets, is getting a major renovation<\/a> as well. As part of that process, it will finally stop turning its back on the waterfront, gaining an entrance from the boardwalk rather than the parking lot. The amusement area at Luna Park, opened in 2010, is a genuinely good place to spend an afternoon, and so is the old Wonder Wheel Park, where the longtime owners, the Vourderis family, have invested significantly. Neither area is the rust-flakes-and-heaving-asphalt scene of 1970s memory but instead a relatively modern experience, though very much not at Six Flags scale. Most of all, the two parks have what the Coney casino plan didn\u2019t: actual local character. They feel like they belong to New York, rather than\u00a0being a transplant from Biloxi or A.C.<\/p>\n

The real change, though, is happening across the street, much of it driven by a rezoning that took place in 2009. Walk westward along Surf Avenue from the subway terminal, and you\u2019ll pass about a dozen newish apartment buildings and construction sites. None is what you\u2019d call an architectural showpiece, but, as Justin Davidson noted earlier this week, that\u2019s Brooklyn these days<\/a>. One building, called Raven Hall after a long-gone pool and bathhouse<\/a>, is a promising stack of affordable housing: It has multiple rent levels reserved for a variety of income ranges, 77 units set aside for people transitioning from the shelter and the street, and apartments whose finishes don\u2019t feel pinched and stingy. Apartments in other building sare renting at market rates, like those in the showy 27-story tower at 1515 Surf Avenue<\/a>. (A junior two-bedroom there facing the ocean goes for $3,410.) In between those buildings, foundations are being dug right now. There are also a bunch of undeveloped lots along that strip, some used for parking or storage, and they\u2019re unlikely to be empty for all that much longer.<\/p>\n

In short, the revitalization that the Coney would ostensibly un-stall has, in fact, already begun to un-stall itself. It\u2019s just not happening in one big glitzy swoop. Instead it\u2019s incremental and gradual, a process that tends to produce better neighborhoods in the long term. If the city wants to accelerate that shift, the Department of Transportation might consider redesigning Surf Avenue into a modern complete street<\/a>, because right now it\u2019s a real Frogger<\/a> game to get across, and new development will inevitably bring more traffic, not less.<\/p>\n

\"US-CONEY-ISLAND-PARK-HEALTH-VIRUS\" <\/p>\n

\n The amusement area today. The casino development would rise about 40 stories at the right-hand edge of this frame.
\n Photo: Ed Jones\/AFP\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n

By the way, the Shore Theater, that perpetual almost-a-project? You could be forgiven for skepticism even now, but it\u2019s really happening<\/a>. The renderings are out there, the scaffolding is up, and the construction crews are in. The logjam is indeed breaking, a little at a time, and it\u2019s happening without slot machines and blackjack.<\/p>\n

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