OPINION: The legacy of Horace Bullard, Coney Island’s would-be developer
Brooklyn Daily Eagle real estate editor Lore Croghan’s recent article about the long-vacant Shore Theater in Coney Island and its uncertain future put the spotlight on its late owner – Horace Bullard, a tragic, controversial figure who was one of the first to re-envision Coney’s renaissance in the 1970s and ‘80s.
As Croghan pointed out, before Bullard died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2013, he kept trying to market the landmarked former theater. He may have been close to a deal at one point, but after his death, his daughter, Jasmine Bullard, pulled it off the market – despite the pleas of brokers who, as one of them told the Eagle, “have clients who are ready, willing and able to write a check for the Shore today.”
Bullard, originally from Harlem, made his money when he established his Kansas Fried Chicken chain in the late 1960s. A largely intact, although closed, Kansas Fried Chicken outlet still exists on the ground floor of the Shore.
During the late ‘70s and ‘80s, he started buying up property in then-depressed Coney Island, including the Shore, the old Playland Arcade and his most famous property, the original Thunderbolt roller-coaster, which was featured in Woody Allen’s 1977 movie “Annie Hall.” (Yes, someone really did live in the wooden house under the coaster—a caretaker).