Neil deMause: The Website

You won’t find it in the paper (they ran out of trees), but it’s officially a Village Voice article, not a Village Voice blog item: My review, in advance of the final games for Yankee and Shea Stadiums, of other ballparks’ final days, and how they’ve changed over the years from poorly attended loot-fests to extravaganzas of nostalgia marketing:

If you’re hoping to attend the sold-out-since-the-Truman-administration final games at Yankee Stadium (this Sunday) or Shea Stadium (the Sunday after), you’d better be independently wealthy. At last check, final-game tickets for sale on StubHub started at $125 for the Mets and $250 for the Yanks. And that Yankees price is for a seat in the left-field bleachers—one enterprising speculator was seeking a mere $16,000 and change for each of four front-row Bronx ducats.

It was not always thus for stadium swan songs…

New York is looking to take advantage of new federal welfare regulations to expand access to education and training. But will it be tripped up by budget woes and bureaucratic foot-dragging?

New federal rules are opening the door for New York state to allow more residents who receive public assistance to obtain education and training, the state’s welfare chief said last week.

Yet the state’s uncertain budget climate and questions about implementation mean the fate of such reforms are uncertain, Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance Commissioner David Hansell told a group of welfare advocates – many of whom have long held that better integrating education into public assistance would help people get off welfare… [read more]

I’ve written about the scene at the Project FAIR help desk for welfare recipients before; today I tell the stories of two women I met last week that exemplify how trying to jump through welfare’s nonsensical hoops can be a full-time job:

If you’ve ever been tempted to think of welfare recipients as lazy, it’s worth a visit to the “fair hearing” site in Brooklyn, where people who get public benefits — whether welfare, food stamps, disability or Medicaid — can go when they have a problem with the system.

Take Crystal Maurin, who was informed earlier this year that she’d failed to show she was doing the 35 hours a week of “work activities” the city now requires. (That she was fully employed at the time as a child-care worker for the city itself — leaving her own 2-year-old with friends while doing so — apparently wasn’t proof enough.)… [read more]

Rumors are afoot that Coney Island’s Astroland may be saved after all. Are they for real?

It seems you can’t keep a good amusement park down: Thursday night, after three days of rumors that the city was hoping to save Astroland from the scrap heap, Save Coney Island’s Tricia Vita sent out an emergency missive to supporters announcing an “urgent last ditch effort to save Coney Island and Astroland for another year,” and including the email addresses of Mayor Bloomberg, Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and Coney Island councilmember Domenic Recchia… [read more]

My glass-half-full speculation, it turned out, came to naught: Astroland, the cherished Coney Island amusement park, closed its doors last night for the last time. And before anyone asks: No, the Wonder Wheel (owned by neighboring Deno’s) and Cyclone (owned by the city, operated by Astroland owner Carol Hill Albert) are not going anywhere. (You’d be surprised how many people, even professional journalists, ask that.)

My report, with pictures:

Last year as Astroland’s summer season came to an end, supporters of the fabled Coney Island amusement park rallied outside the gates to demand that it remain open. This year, not so much: When the gates went up for Astroland’s final day yesterday morning, there was just a small crowd of families and curiosity seekers, who quickly fanned out with their cameras and ride tickets in hand.

The mood was very different this year, and for good reason. As park owner Carol Hill Albert announced on Thursday, the 46-year-old amusement park, which opened on the site of the old Feltman’s beer garden back when the Parachute Jump was still in working order, has run out of lives. Next year, in all likelihood, the space between the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel will be an empty lot… [read more]

This Thursday is September 11, and Major League Baseball is marking the day by dressing up its players in “patriotic” uniforms:

This Thursday, all Major League Baseball teams will take the field wearing specially designed “Stars and Stripes” caps, part of the league’s Welcome Back Veterans initiative. (Barring rainouts, the Yankees and Mets won’t take part, as they’re off that day.) Following the games, the caps will be auctioned to raise money for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

There’s nothing wrong with helping veterans — no matter how you feel about America’s current wars, those returning from battle are in undeniable need of help — but doing so on September 11 turns a simple charity event into a troubling political statement… [read more]

I revisit some of the small business operators who were threatened by downtown Brooklyn redevelopment last year, and find that many have now been forced out entirely:

Jeff Gargiulo’s e-mail address still says “BagelGuys,” but he’s no longer a bagel guy. Not since the day last year that he got an unexpected eviction notice from his landlord, who said his nine-year-old store on Willoughby Street in downtown Brooklyn was slated to be demolished to make way for a condo tower.

Thousands of Gargiulo’s customers signed petitions, but all it got him was a three-month stay of execution, after which he sold his equipment — at “10 cents on the dollar,” he says — and is now unemployed… [read more]

A look at the burning issue of the day, if you’re a Yankee fan without a taste for ballpark prices: Will the team try to level a ban on bringing in outside food when they move to their new city-financed stadium next year?

It says something about how the Yankees’ season is going that the biggest excitement at the stadium came when the team tried to ban fans from bringing sunscreen through the gates. Anyone who complained was pointed to the concession stands, which offered tiny one-ounce tubes for a whopping $5.

The club ultimately backed off, but the kerfuffle could foreshadow a bigger battle to come… [read more]

Just like last year, Astroland is again weeks away from the end of its season with no lease in place for next summer. Dire headlines to the contrary, though, the fabled Coney Island amusement park may be more likely to stay put than it appeared in the spring:

The headline in today’s amNewYork is grim: Astroland owner Carol Hill Albert says she’s preparing for the 46-year-old Coney Island theme park to close for good next month unless she gets a one-year lease extension from landlord Thor Equities within the next week. Asked by the paper if she was resigned to closing, Albert said, “I kind of am. I’m getting there.”

Before anyone panics in fear of having to go cold turkey on their skeeball jones, remember that this is the same thing Albert said all last summer, when she repeatedly put her rides up for sale, then pulled them off again in hopes of striking a deal with Thor. In fact, the real news here is that Albert says she’ll now settle for a one-year lease extension… [read more]

Because you can’t have too much of a good thing, I report for the Village Voice today on New York’s experiment with shutting Manhattan streets to traffic:

After trial runs in the hinterlands of Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue and Montague Street, the NYC Summer Streets program landed in Manhattan for the first of three consecutive Saturdays this weekend. The big question: Would taking a contiguous strip of avenues from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park and shutting it to cars (driven or parked) draw more than the trickle of folks who attended the earlier experiments?

The answer: Hell yeah. Helped along by a crisp, breezy morning that felt more mid-May than mid-August, Lafayette Street, Fourth Avenue, and Park Avenue were thronged with bicyclists, joggers, more bicyclists, stroller-pushing pedestrians, and still more bicyclists… [read more]