By Nitasha Tiku 9:15am

Secret Weapons

Seth Pinsky

Let’s Make a Deal! How Mike’s Mild-Mannered Closer Seth Pinsky Got the City Building Again

Imagine, if you will, the landscape of New York City 15 years hence. A drive to Citi Field in Willets Point takes you past a pleasant if overpriced cluster of residential buildings, rather than seedy chop-shops. Roosevelt Island is home to a sprawling $2 billion applied-sciences campus spinning out an army of developers to populate ping-pong-table-clad start-up clusters from Dumbo to Union Square. On Manhattan’s far West Side, the rezoned stretch of Hudson Yards offers millions of square feet for office space, housing and retail and 14 acres of open public space. You can already see traces of a more built-up, scrubbed-down New York in Luna Park’s freshly-painted Scream Zone, the first new roller-coasters Coney Island has seen in 80 years, and the rapidly-metastasizing arena at Atlantic Yards, which will soon play home court to the rebranded Brooklyn Nets.

It’s hardly a scenario Seth Pinsky could have imagined in September 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed just seven months into his tenure as president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC), a not-for-profit arm of the Mayor’s office charged with fostering economic growth across the five boroughs.

At the time, Mr. Pinsky was a 36-year-old former lawyer and investment analyst, only a few years removed from a private sector gig refinancing real estate deals for the big banks as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb. He had one big win under his belt—jump-starting the World Trade Center redevelopment project—but he didn’t have “a political bone in his body,” as one insider put it. “People kept saying to me, ‘Wow, you’re the head of the Economic Development Corporation? We’re in an economic meltdown!’’ Mr. Pinsky told The Observer.

“At the time it meant, ‘You must be really crazy.’” Read More

By Matt Chaban 3/13 6:40pm

Sodom by the Sea

Endangered species. (Getty)

Bloomberg’s Luna Sea: Tears and Jeers at the Coney Island Boardwalk Vote

“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

By Matt Chaban 3/12 5:32pm

Sodom by the Sea

The sands of time have come for the boardwalk. (Getty)

Pave Paradise and Put Up a Sidewalk: City Approves Concrete Coney Island Boardwalk [Updated]

Following a raucous three hour meeting that felt at times like a botany lecture and a carnival sideshow, replete with boos and cheers, the city’s Public Design Commission voted unanimously in favor or remaking a five-block-long section of the iconic Riegelmann Boardwalk in Coney Island out of concrete and plastic rather than wood.

More than 50 community members turned out to decry the plan, with all but two of them opposing it for myriad reasons, from the historical to the aesthetic to the kinesthetic. After enduring hours of angry testimony, the commission considered a number of the community’s complaints, challenging the Parks Department to relocate the concrete swath set to run through the middle of the boardwalk, moving it away from the beach and closer to the land, as well as pressuring the department to include wood alternatives in other sections of what was deemed a pilot program for the eventual transformation of the entire 2.5 mile wooden way.

But in the end, the commissioners conditionally approved the plan 6-0, so long as these alternatives are explored by Parks. Read More

By Matt Chaban 3/09 3:41pm

Sodom by the Sea

6 Photos

Take a Concretewalk

A Hard Stand on Hard Top: In Defense of the Coney Island Concrete Walk

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

By Rex Reed 1/31 7:47pm

theater

Steele and Garofalo.

Russian Transport is a Mail Order Mess

It’s been a calamitous week off-Broadway. In the New Group production of Russian Transport, a loud, inconsequential play full of cussing and yelling at the Acorn Theater on West 42nd Street, a family of mewling, whining Russian immigrants in a cluttered two-story house in Coney Island are struggling to keep their car service business going. Read More

By Matt Chaban 1/20 1:02pm

Sodom by the Sea

New York's historical roller coaster "Th

Rumbles Stripped! Coney Cyclone Becoming Safer, Smoother Snoozer Coaster

It may not have loops or corkscrews or whirligigs, you’re feet don’t hang and there’s no pneumatic launch. Like a true New Yorker, the Cyclone never needed any gimmicks to be world’s greatest roller coaster (a title it’s held indisputably for the past 85 years). A good deal of the coaster’s excitement is owing to the rough ride it gives, like an out-of-control subway train. It turns out a little grit and neglect can be good for you.

But just as Central Amusements International has been sanitizing the boardwalk, the city-sanctioned Coney Island operator has committed perhaps its greatest indignity yet. Sure, Ruby’s is a timeless Coney tradition, but you do not mess with the Cyclone. Read More