Neil deMause: The Website

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]

Kansas City Star columnist Hearne Christopher Jr. today ran a long interview with me on that city’s new subsidized arena (which still lacks a sports tenant) and subsidized renovations to the stadiums of the Chiefs and Royals. Key quote:

“I think there are things that can be done to slow it, but I’ve been predicting the tide will turn for 10 years and it hasn’t. Until local officials start saying no and they cut off the money supply, teams are always going to do this because the rewards for the teams are so great that they’ll wait out recessions. They’ll even wait out Barack Obama.”

Thanks to Hearne for giving me the space to pontificate at length, though his head is still bigger than mine.

Headline from today’s New York Sun:

Cost of Tuition at Colleges Breasts $50,000 a Year

“Breast” (the verb) can mean to “overcome” (as in an obstacle), but not to surpass, which is what the Sun means here. Either some headline writer got lazy with the thesaurus, or this writing headlines to nab Google hits thing has gotten out of hand.

So the reports by CNN’s Gary Tuchman of serious flooding in the Lower 9th Ward - as well as his later report that the police were telling anyone in the area that the levees there could “explode at any time” - turned out to be inaccurate: Some water did overtop the levees there, but it looks as if the levees held firm. Of course, it took hours before viewers could be assured of this, as CNN’s (and other stations’) reporters otherwise stayed out of New Orleans’ low-lying neighborhoods, relying solely on Army Corps of Engineers assurances that the levees were holding. Which turned out to be true this time, but if it hadn’t been, who would have known?

In all, the Gustav reporting was a notch better than that during Katrina (at least someone bothered to train cameras on some levees), but still exhibited the focus on the tourist district and reliance on official sources that plagued coverage three years ago, at least until one NBC cameraman thought to walk the few blocks to the Convention Center. For example, while disgraced former FEMA chief Mike Brown has been interviewed on nearly every news station about the Gustav response, I’ve yet to see any interviews with New Orleanians who were evacuated on the buses that, this time, the government provided for people with no means of getting out of harm’s way. (Though Anderson Cooper’s blog does have a brief item about one evacuee shelter with no working plumbing.) If nothing else, asking evacuees whether they knew of people who’d been forced to stay behind in New Orleans would have helped answer the question of whether official claims that only 10,000 people remained in the city were true - something no station attempted to verify.

Anyway, looks like there will be two more opportunities coming up for the news media to work on their coverage. We’ll see how they do.

With Anderson Cooper momentarily off the air (he’s moving his satellite truck so it doesn’t blow over), CNN has turned to Gary Tuchman, who’s finally made it to the Lower 9th Ward. There, he reports, a “deluge of water” is pouring in “over and through” the levee, and stop signs are already underwater. Tuchman promised camera footage to come.

So kudos to CNN for getting somebody out into the neighborhoods this time. Though they’d get more kudos if Tuchman hadn’t been standing next to Cooper in the French Quarter an hour ago, talking about how it looked like New Orleans would be spared flooding this time.

Best unintentionally funny moment of the Gustav reporting so far: Anderson Cooper, standing in the official reporting zone of the French Quarter, assuring viewers that “You don’t see anyone on the streets here except police and emergency personnel - anyone still in town is hunkered down.” At that very moment, four twentysomething guys in street clothes wandered through the shot behind him, waving their arms in the hurricane-force winds.

I figure another ten minutes before it ends up on YouTube.

Flipping cable channels for the latest on Hurricane Gustav, I can’t help notice a striking similarity to the run-up to Hurricane Katrina three years ago: Every single news station is reporting from the French Quarter, or the adjacent downtown region. Even Anderson Cooper, the supposed hero journalist of Katrina, remarked a bit ago that while city officials say the city is mostly evacuated, he has no way of knowing if it’s true.

Is it really too much to expect that, now that Katrina alerted the nation that parts of New Orleans exist outside the tourist districts, the media actually go report from there to see how folks are handling this new threat? Probably yes - after all, a mere six months after Katrina, the vast majority of the reporting was on how Mardi Gras had returned to normal, and never mind that the rest of the city was a disaster, and tens of thousands of people were still displaced.

I did just see one CNN correspondent - I didn’t catch his name - mention to Cooper that while the tourist areas of New Orleans are in reasonably good shape today, the outlying neighborhoods are not. Still, I haven’t seen a single piece of video footage, or even blog post, from the poorer sections of town. Let’s hope we don’t have a repeat of 2005, when the nation went to bed on Monday night assured that “the water is going down” in the French Quarter, only to later learn that at moment, the levees had been breached for more than 12 hours, and half the city - the not-ready-for-prime-time half - was already underwater.

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]

NBC’s Olympics coverage has generated an awful lot of laughably awkward prose - my favorite was the gymnastics commentator (not sure who - don’t think it was Al Trautwig) who remarked that “If the Chinese spell ‘history’ with a capital H, that goes double for their rivalry with Japan.”

At least TV commentators, though, can argue that they need to fill hours of broadcast time with no ability to go back and edit themselves. The New York Times doesn’t have that excuse for this line that appeared in an article today about one-legged Olympic swimmer Natalie du Toit:

Her right leg works overtime, cramping in long races. Exhaustion drops her hips low into the water. A chiropractor must balance her body, as if it were a checkbook.

If the New York Times is using chiropractors to balance its checkbook, that explains a lot.