With crowds packing the Coney Island Boardwalk, what better time to debate its famous fate.
In the spring, after a heated year-long debate, the city’s Public Design Commission decided to allow the Parks Department to replace the world-renowned walkway with a combination of concrete and plastic promenade that still has locals more steamed than a bucket of boardwalk clams. Read More
“My name is Michael Greco, and I am a direct descendent of the Greco Romans.” Mr. Greco stood before an overflow crowd in a fluorescent-lit conference room on the fifth floor of 253 Broadway on Monday afternoon, for an otherwise routine meeting of the Public Design Commission. “They built roads, bridges, aqueducts, great structures. My ancestors would be rolling in their grave if they saw this.”
To the 50 or so people packed into the conference room with Mr. Greco, the Rigelmann Boardwalk on Coney Island is their modern day Apian Way, and the New York City Parks Department is a band of marauding Visigoths. Instead of pickaxes and torches, the city is attacking with slabs of concrete and faux wood beams made from recycled plastic. Read More
There has been plenty of hand wringing over the fate of the Coney Island Boardwalk and whether or not it will become the Coney Concretewalk. The Public Design Commission is set to make the final vote on the seaside sidewalk this coming Monday. There, New Yorkers for Parks, an advocacy group that fights for better funding for city open space, will provide testimony in favor of the new hybrid concrete and plastic proposal for the boardwalk.
The group actually makes an interesting, nuanced argument—that you can read in full below—about why this plan is acceptable, if not ideal, and it is one that comes down to, well, the same thing every decision in this city comes down to: money. The cash-constrained Parks Department gets all of $1 million a year to maintain its boardwalks, and not just for Coney Island but those in the Rockaways and on Staten Island, too. Read More
Our hearts, rather than our feet, have been burning over the fate of the iconic Coney Island boardwalk. Sure, it’s rickety and splinter-ridden, but a Concretewalk is just wrong. The city has agreed to keep the concrete to a bare minimum, which is still too much, but now it looks like there is no hope for any wood on the boardwalk. Read More
Even as Mother Nature threw hurricanes and earthquakes at the city this summer, dampening spirits on Governors Island, it did not stop revelers from flocking to the new Coney Island, setting attendance records for the second year in a row. Read More
Just under a year ago, plans to replace the beloved Coney Island boardwalk with concrete were reveled. Sure, it would solve the problems of splinters and loose planks, but it’s a boardwalk for godsakes, operative word being board. Locals tried to come up with alternatives, like a concrete median that would still have wood on one or both sides, but the Parks Department refused, and so the boardwalk will be paved, The Brooklyn Paper reports. Read More
Will this be the last, real summer in Coney Island, or the dawning of a new day that will see the storied Sodom by the Sea returned to its former glory? Read More
After decades of destitution, the new Coney Island is finally taking shape–and as usual, just as many people hate it as love it. New rides, new condos, new aquarium and now a new boardwalk, if it can be called that.
This fight first surfaced in the fall, when the Parks Department proposed Read More
