Neil deMause: The Website

It’s been just about forever since anyone built anything new in Coney Island (this doesn’t count), so little wonder everyone seemed so excited today to attend a press conference announcing actual new stuff this summer:

In what’s becoming a bit of a Coney Island tradition, City Hall officials shlepped out to Brooklyn in a slushstorm today to make the long-rumored announcement that the Italian firm Zamperla has been tapped to open a new amusement park in Coney to replace the dearly departed Astroland. Actually, two new amusement parks: Luna Park (named in part to honor the classic Coney park that burned down in 1946, in part because that’s what they’re all called in Italy) will open on the old Astroland site this summer, and the less-historically-monikered “Scream Zone” will follow in 2011.[read more]

More than you ever wanted to know about the fate of Brooklyn’s last surviving big-league ballpark wall:

The saga of the last surviving Brooklyn ballpark wall just keeps getting murkier and murkier. The latest news: Con Ed, which since the 1920s has owned the Gowanus property that once was a series of ballparks named Washington Park, tells the Voice that it is going to tear down part of the brick wall that runs along Third Avenue — but debate still rages over whether that section is a historic baseball artifact or just, you know, a wall… [read more]

Years after first weighing in on the Washington Park controversy, I get to revisit the question of just whose ballpark wall is still standing in Brooklyn:

After all the hoohah over the last surviving remnant of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ home before Ebbets Field, it turns out that the wall in question isn’t actually so much a Dodgers wall after all. “I can say with absolute certainty that this wall was not part of Washington Park prior to the Brooklyn team’s departure [in 1912],” historian and Brooklynpix proprietor Brian Merlis declares in today Daily News. “It’s still an historic wall, but there’s no evidence … that it’s the original wall.”

This will come as no surprise to readers of the BrooklynBallparks.com site (run by my Field of Schemes colleague David Dyte), which for years now has been quietly laying out evidence that the windowed brick wall running along Third Avenue between 1st and 3rd Streets in Gowanus was built in 1914, after the Dodgers’ departure, when Washington Park was reconstructed to play host to the Brooklyn Tip-Tops of the Federal League… [read more]

Attempting to make sense of yesterday’s court ruling on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards arena project:

So is the long-heralded arrival of Atlantic Yards finally at hand, or what? According to the front page of today’s Times (echoed on its sports page), the answer is yes: Following yesterday’s appeals court ruling, which dismissed challenges to the state seizing private land for the Nets-arena-and-other-stuff project, “a cloud of uncertainty that has hung over Atlantic Yards for more than a year had lifted,” writes development reporter Charles Bagli, while rookie Nets beat writer Jonathan Abrams calls the ruling the “last major hurdle in the groundbreaking process.”

When and whether the bulldozers will actually pull up to Freddy’s, though, remains murky… [read more]

Still more on Coney Island, this time an analysis of how we got here for Metro:

It’s happy time in Coney Island! Sure, Astroland is still a vacant lot, as are the former batting cages and go-cart rides, and even the few remaining attractions are shuttered for the long winter.

But Joe Sitt, the developer who bought up most of the beachfront — and turned it into those vacant lots — has finally sold out to the city, and there is much rejoicing… [read more]

New York City has put out the call for an amusement-park operator for its newly acquired Coney Island land:

Now that it has seven acres of Coney Island beachfront property in its mitts, the city isn’t wasting time gearing up for next summer. In addition to inviting Lola Staar to return, today the Economic Development Corporation posted on its website a 54-page Request for Proposals for an interim amusement park operator for its new funland… [read more]

The long-running saga of New York City’s battle with developer Joe Sitt over Coney Island is over, but the amusement district’s future remains unclear:

It was, Mayor Bloomberg said more than once, “a day people probably thought never would arrive.” After more than a year of negotiations and at least one false positive, the mayor and developer Joe Sitt took to the Blue Room podium today to announce that Sitt’s Thor Equities has agreed to sell 6.9 acres of its beachfront property to the city for incorporation in a new “amusement district.” Said the mayor in announcing the deal: “This really is a win-win-win for everybody.”… [read more]

With a horde of reporters wandering around the Bronx looking for World Series stories, it’s probably inevitable that some of them would wander onto 161st Street and ask local merchants how business is going what with the new stadium next door. Answer: not so hot.

It’s officially a meme: The New York Times, following in the footsteps of WNYC and WCBS-TV, has an article today on how business at stores on 161st Street has cratered after the new Yankee Steakhouse and Baseball Stadium opened this year. A sample of the Times’ contribution to the genre:

While working in his father’s souvenir shop up the block, [Saeed Alawy of Pin Stripe Collectibles] recalled, there was no time to fold the T-shirts before selling them. Customers were lined up three and four deep at the counter yelling out orders and tossing wads of bills.

“They were throwing the money,” Mr. Alawy, 47, said.

Over the course of an hour on Monday, just 13 shoppers wandered into Pin Stripe Collectibles and Mr. Alawy made only four sales, for a total of $107.

One could nitpick that there wasn’t actually a game in the Bronx on Monday, but the other reports indicate that it’s a problem even on game days: The Yankee Tavern’s owner told WCBS that his business is off 20 percent this season, while the Concourse Card Shop’s is down by half… [read more]

I just received my hot-off-the-presses copy of the new issue of City Limits Investigates, with a report by CLI editor Jarrett Murphy and myself on how one New York City zip code — 11237, which covers most of the neighborhood of Bushwick, and also happens to be the geographic center of the city — has fared the last eight years under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. You can read Jarrett’s short summary online, but to see my section (which is focused on housing) you’ll have to order a physical copy. A sample of my housing chapter:

At a meeting of tenant volunteers for the Bushwich Housing Independence Project, the stories pour out, in both English and Spanish. All the volunteers are themselves tenants in Bushwick’s many rent-regulated apartments, mostly in the century-old six- or eight-family row houses that remain the neighborhood’s signature housing stock. All described similar tales of landlord harassment with the goal of getting them out in order to slip the units to market-rent status.

“I have no cooking gas and no hot water,” says Luz Varela, a board member and volunteer tenant advocate. “He’s doing everything in his power to get me to up and move. But I’m not gonna budge.” Finally, after she took her landlord to court, his lawyer claimed that the shutoff of services was a mistake stemming from a renumbering of apartments in her building.

Another BHIP volunteer, Hector Vazquez, says his landlord renovated his bathroom but made it too small to be usable. “You can’t go inside. You have to go outside and back in, like you’re walking backward,” he says. “You can’t even put your clothes on in there.”

There’s another 9,500 words or so on this and how 11237 is faring in terms of crime, jobs, schools, and other measures. So really, pick up a copy.

Four years in the making, the Coney Island rezoning plan got its final approval from the city council today — and yet still it’s not over. I have the live play-by-play on the Village Voice site:

Against all odds, there’s actually working (sort of) WiFi in the city council chamber, so I’m going to attempt to liveblog today’s final vote on the city’s Coney Island rezoning plan. The council’s land use committee gave its preliminary blessing last week, so the last step needed for approval is a vote of the full council — which, barring a last-second freakout by Coney council rep Domenic Recchia, is expected to proceed as planned… [read more]