Should Be Used for Parks, Say Locals
By Sarah Ryley
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
CONEY ISLAND — Taconic Investment Partners is looking to expand the footprint of its planned waterfront development, anchored by the former Child’s Restaurant, and is negotiating with the city to do so by using adjacent land controlled by the Parks Department.
Ari Shalam, a Taconic senior vice president, says the negotiations are complicated because the transfer of land controlled by the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation requires state legislation, and the replacement of an equal amount of land elsewhere in the vicinity.
Several people in the community, when made aware of the negotiations, say a private developer shouldn’t get control of the land. They say the vacant land and waterfront parking lots should be turned into a public park or used for amusements accessible to the working class, such as a new home for Astroland Park.
“They want to put luxury housing in, but when you come down here it’s a very democratic place — you see every variety of human being that you can imagine,” says Coney Island resident Ida Sanhoff. “When they put in this luxury housing, how are those people going to feel about going to the beach and sitting next to all these poor people?”
Taconic, which controls a 99-year lease of the landmarked Child’s building and owns an adjacent vacant block, in addition to vacant property north of KeySpan Park, plans to build a mixed-use development on the waterfront site. Plans include ground-floor “entertainment retail ,” housing and “food-related uses” in the restaurant.
“If the city is thinking of trading valuable parkland that’s on the waterfront, the most important questions are, what is the community getting out of that and how is the public being included in these decisions,” says Geoffrey Croft, president of NYC Park Advocates.
“I’m very wary of parkland being taken away for non-park purposes,” says Croft. “There’s very little park space and playgrounds in the community, so any opportunity to utilize that land and build a playground should be top priority.”
Broken Promises
The parkland east of Taconic’s property is a parking lot for KeySpan, and represents a history of broken promises to the community.
Until a decade ago, it was to be part of a year-round amusement fantasyland, spanning from West 15th to West 21st streets, that would have revived rides from the famed Steeplechase Park destroyed by Fred Trump in the late 1960s. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani nixed that idea during his second term, instead promising a community “SportsPlex” on the property, a contingency for the approval of his less-popular minor league stadium.
SportsPlex died shortly after the first Cyclones game, but some say the money’s still allocated for it somewhere in the cosmos of city budget. Today, a small soccer field and the recently re-lit Parachute Jump are nestled alongside the sloping entryway to KeySpan and its expansive parking lot, a small fulfillment of both those promises.
The Parks Department also controls a waterfront vacant lot next to Child’s — overgrown, at least shoulder-high, with weeds — and a parking lot behind the building. Combined, at 144,905 square feet, the two lots are slightly larger than the property now occupied by Astroland Park, which will be evicted by developer Thor Equities after this season.
Carol Hill Albert, whose family has operated Astroland for 45 years, says she’d be very interested in moving her rides west of KeySpan, to land owned by the Parks Department. For more than three decades, the family has held the operating agreement to run the city-owned Cyclone, which occupies parkland next to the New York Aquarium.
Albert has, in the past, offered to help the city pay to move Astroland’s rides anywhere in Coney Island, and recently agreed to take them off the auction block in response to pleas from elected officials.
But despite the ostensibly fervent effort on the part of the city to keep Astroland in Coney Island, Albert says she often feels put on the back burner, in favor of the big developers like Taconic and Thor Equities, and left to fend for herself.
“The reality is that there’s not a lot of land that the city owns within the amusement district [besides the street beds],” says Lynn Kelly, president of the Coney Island Development Corporation (CIDC).
Tale of Two Coneys
The “incredible branding opportunity” found in Coney Island, with its storied past and distinct graphic identity, has been held hostage over the decades by disparate ownership, vacant parcels and patchwork ownership, says Kelly. “Without enhancing the amusement district, we’ve lost that brand.”
“Coney East” is the term Kelly uses for the area on that side of KeySpan Park, where she says the “enhanced amusements” should go. Thor Equities purchased most of that property, with controversial plans for a $2 billion mixed-use amusement development that would also include residential housing, although these plans are in the process of being modified after the city rejected the housing portion.
Thor Equities has already cleared away the miniature golf course, go-cart tracks, flea market and batting range; Astroland Park and the boardwalk businesses are looking at their last season.
Taconic owns property in “Coney West,” and the vacant lots north of Surf Avenue.
All of this property is within the city’s only district zoned exclusively for amusements — while Deno’s Wonder Wheel Park (which has not been sold) and Astroland are certainly the heart of that district, KeySpan Park is squarely in the center.
CIDC spokesman Jorge Montalvo says the agency is working very hard to find a new home for Astroland, but that locating the park in Coney West wouldn’t be feasible.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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