Could be dead.
Photo: The Coney
Outside the Coney Island YMCA on September 10, the crowd was not quite at July beach levels, but it sure wasn’t 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 “YES” 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 — my unofficial estimate — 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’s company Thor Equities, in partnership with several other groups, including the Chickasaw Nation.
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 — and it was reported elsewhere, too, and seemingly caught on an audio recording — 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.) Quite a few people talked about adding gambling to a neighborhood that already has its share of addiction problems.
Until Monday, it seemed the development money might win out as usual. The required city rezoning had passed 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—Councilmember Justin Brannan, Borough President Antonio Reynoso, and State Senator Jessica Scarcella-Spanton—declared that they were voting “no.” Another, Marissa Solomon, had already said she’s against it. A two-thirds majority is required, so that’s enough, with an insurance vote, to sink this thing. Brannan’s statement, in the Brooklyn Paper, was particularly emphatic.
It was not a foregone conclusion. Although Brannan had earlier stated his opposition, he’d grown more opaque about his intentions over the summer, saying he’d let the process play out, and he’d voted for the rezoning. There was some speculation that he’d been pushed to flip his vote. Nobody was quite sure about Reynoso’s stance either. Now that they’re established on the “no” 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 on Monday. That leaves five proposals, or four if you cross off Coney Island.) The official, final licensing vote will follow in December.
That’s a good turn of events, because from any viewpoint except a casino developer’s, 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. A 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’s American Dream — a mall that itself includes a roller coaster — is yet again in a fight for solvency. 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’d be left with an underused, rapidly going-to-seed mall propped up by the casino’s tables and slots. Then what? The mall fills up with crappy weed shops and keychain hawkers; underfunding means the maintenance slips; eventually, maybe, there’s a bankruptcy, followed by a long twilight as an eyesore.
From left: Photo: The ConeyPhoto: The Coney
From top: Photo: The ConeyPhoto: The Coney
The one semi-persuasive case that anyone was able to summon for the Coney — and the most persuasive one, at least to me — was the “get it done already” argument. As I’ve noted in a past column, we’ve seen more than a half-century of people shaking their heads over the crumbling state of Coney Island. Given that it’s 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, the century-old moviehouse and office building across from Nathan’s. It’s been ripe for restoration since the 1970s and has sat, empty and disintegrating, for most of that time. “They really ought to do something there” was the neighborhood’s mantra.
Increasingly, though, that’s an outsider’s view, one that’s 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’s 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 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’t: actual local character. They feel like they belong to New York, rather than being a transplant from Biloxi or A.C.
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’ll pass about a dozen newish apartment buildings and construction sites. None is what you’d call an architectural showpiece, but, as Justin Davidson noted earlier this week, that’s Brooklyn these days. One building, called Raven Hall after a long-gone pool and bathhouse, 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’t 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 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’re unlikely to be empty for all that much longer.
In short, the revitalization that the Coney would ostensibly un-stall has, in fact, already begun to un-stall itself. It’s just not happening in one big glitzy swoop. Instead it’s 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, because right now it’s a real Frogger game to get across, and new development will inevitably bring more traffic, not less.
The amusement area today. The casino development would rise about 40 stories at the right-hand edge of this frame.
Photo: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images
By the way, the Shore Theater, that perpetual almost-a-project? You could be forgiven for skepticism even now, but it’s really happening. 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’s happening without slot machines and blackjack.