A colorful Mermaid Parade-goer (Featured in the parade's Kickstarter video)

Six months ago, Superstorm Sandy left Coney Island’s annual Mermaid Parade high and dry. Now, parade participants are hoping their new Kickstarter campaign will help them get back on their flippers.When Sandy struck Coney Island last October, it completely flooded the Mermaid Parade’s headquarters on Surf Avenue. With thousands of dollars of damage still in need of repair, the parade’s organizers realized they wouldn’t be able to finance this year’s parade on their own.

Mermaid Parade-goers pose and pout for the camera (Featured in the Mermaid Parade Kickstarter video)

“Let’s face it: we’ve had some hard times,” says parade founder Dick Zigun, in a video on the Kickstarter page. In the video, Mr. Zigun is standing in the damaged headquarters. “Where I’m standing was up to here in floodwater—our headquarters was totally destroyed…We’re still recovering hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, and it’s just beyond us. We can’t pull it all off this year.” The parade costs around $190,000.

The Kickstarter campaign—titled “Save the Coney Island Mermaid from Extinction!”—aims to raise $100,000 in the next 25 days. Already, the campaign is making some serious waves. Launched just two days ago, the parade has already raised upwards of $34,500 dollars from over 750 donors.

“I’m freaking flabbergasted,” Mr. Zigun told the Daily News after the campaign raised $27,000 in a single day. “Would I bet money that there will be a Mermaid Parade? Send a bookie my way.”

Dick Zigun, founder of the Mermaid Parade (Featured in the Mermaid Parade Kickstarter video)

“Please don’t let the Mermaid parade flounder in a sea of apathy!” wrote one impassioned commenter on the Kickstarter page. “Courage, Mer-folks! We WILL prevail,” wrote another.

The Mermaid Parade has been an annual Coney Island tradition since its inception in 1983. Every year, over a thousand elaborately costumed participants make their way down Mermaid Avenue, Surf Avenue, and Neptune Avenue in celebration of “Coney Island pride,” according to the campaign.

We’re crossing our fins in hopes that the Mermaid Parade’s campaign will continue to go swimmingly!

Battered and broken. (Mayor's Office/Flickr)

While the Bloomberg administration has largely come in for praise for its Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts, questions remain over whether City Hall made things worse by encouraging waterfront development. The Independent Budget Office certainly believes so in a critical analysis it has issued looking at the seemingly hypocritical policy initiatives Mayor Bloomberg had championed.

On the one hand, the city had taken pains to reduce its carbon footprint as it acknowledges the dangers posed by rising sea levels and superstorms. At the same time, the administration continues to encourage new residential and commercial projects in the very areas it is wringing its hands over.

Yet even as City Hall grappled with these concerns it continued to put substantial resources into major development projects on the waterfront, rezoning sites as manufacturing declined— including some in prime areas for flooding, the so-called Zone A evacuation areas. Just one month before Sandy struck the city, Mayor Bloomberg announced a plan by private developers to build a $500 million complex on city-owned land on Staten Island’s North Shore that would include the world’s largest Ferris wheel as well as a hotel and outlet mall. Part of the site sits in a floodplain.

An even larger development project is planned on the Coney Island waterfront, one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by Sandy. The city has rezoned the area to allow the development of hotels, housing, and a new amusement park, and has allocated more than $400 million for sewer upgrades, land acquisition, lighting, boardwalk and park improvements, and other projects to foster the redevelopment plan. On the Queens waterfront, the city is investing $147 million in the Hunters Point South project, which also sits in Zone A. Already under construction, Hunters Point South includes 5,000 apartments, a 1,100-seat school, and retail space.

To be fair, the Bloomberg Administration has taken steps to protect the city from the affects of rising sea levels and storm surges, following existing city building codes and Federal Emergency Management Agency guidelines. But these guidelines may not be adequate in the face of storms with the fury of Sandy.

So is this a sound policy, or a sinking one?

A freak show of another sort. (Getty)

We have all had that moment, post-Sandy, where the breadth of the storm's damage has finally sunk in.  For New Yorkers for Parks, that moment came on Nov. 9, when the group was asked by the Coney Island Development Corporation to do a survey of the neighborhood's public spaces. What its staff found shocked them.

"The open spaces of Coney Island felt forlorn and forgotten when the staff of New Yorkers for Parks arrived," wrote the group in an account on its site. "Scenes were eerie as we began our assessment. The neighborhood seemed frozen in a moment of shock. Formerly flooded cars were parked hopelessly with open hoods. Residents waited on corners below broken traffic lights, asking when food would arrive. Some lingered by waterlogged couches, chairs and dining room sets waiting for garbage pickup. Boxes of rotted bananas, once slated for delivery, stretched half a block near the Haber Houses. There was little moving, other than the occasional utility truck or emergency vehicle. The next day, several hundred volunteers would arrive, eager to help. But that Friday provided a tragic post-Sandy snapshot."

It's another reminder that much of the city still needs help as it recovers from the storm. Help that is, in large part, being provided by New York volunteers like Michael Samuelian, a New Yorkers for Parks group leader, who was supporting the survey.

“It was daunting at first,” Mr. Samuelian explained to the group, “and when you’re in the middle of it, it’s hard to get a sense of what you’re accomplishing. But then when I stepped back, there was a real feeling of pride; we had a sense of the difference we had made. It was especially meaningful because we were working so far from the areas most people visit near the boardwalk.”

The city is recovering, but if you were in any doubt if there was still work to be done, New Yorkers for Parks has your answer: Yes.

Illo by Ed Johnson

Peer under the tent flap of our splendid new civic order, and you’re guaranteed to see a disturbing sight: all the same failed policies of the past, lovingly preserved in formaldehyde.

That’s what I got from Amy Nicholson’s thoroughly enjoyable, thoroughly enraging new documentary, Zipper: Coney Island’s Last Wild Ride, which won a special jury prize last week at DOC NYC, New York’s Documentary Film Festival and is currently making the festival rounds. Ms. Nicholson was generous enough to open her film with a quote from me about the destruction of the old Coney, though I have no other association with the production.

What she and I do share is a deep resentment over what has been done to this iconic New York neighborhood under the guise of “improving” it. Ms. Nicholson’s movie centers around the travails of Eddie Miranda, operator of a single Coney ride, the “Zipper,” a carnival perennial that was one of some 42 profitable small businesses shuttered recently by the city’s developer partners after 38 years of operation. Much of Zipper involves the very human story of Mr. Miranda, his workers, and other small-time carnies as they face the end of an era, but the larger forces at play kept dragging Ms. Nicholson—a self-described political naïf—into the looking-glass world of New York development.

Just what will happen now to Coney is anybody’s guess, following its submersion in the storm surge caused by Hurricane Sandy. But the plan for the area that the city aided and abetted is a depressingly familiar “razzle,” as the local parlance goes. Much of the area was bought up by a developer with the Dickensian moniker Joe Sitt, an impish character who specializes in acquiring properties, clearing them of tenants, then holding them in limbo until the authorities change the zoning of his parcels, greatly enhancing their value.

The razzle here is that, almost from the start, the city was playing along. Mr. Sitt was paid off at $14 million an acre, more than 10 times what his lots were originally worth—a price that approached that of top Manhattan street frontage. The city let itself be “forced” into reducing the designated amusement zone on Coney from 60 acres to just over nine, and into provisions that will likely allow future developers to erect 30 separate 30-story condominium towers on the island.

The waste of public money is appalling in a city that regularly claims it must lay off teachers and close firehouses. But the greater crime here is the vision of New York that our public and private leaders have come to internalize: that the city should be just like everyplace else.

The directors of this scam were, as usual, unelected and unaccountable: City Planning Director Amanda Burden; Lynn B. Kelly, president of the Coney Island Development Corporation, now called the Alliance for Coney Island; Bob Lieber, the longtime Lehman Brothers real estate investment banker turned former deputy mayor. In what has become standard operating procedure, they sold the idea to the media, at least, with fantastical, computer-generated images of a new Coney that had absolutely nothing to do with any real plans.

Like all those who would lead us to hell, Ms. Burden, Ms. Kelly, Mr. Lieber and company were armed with earnest good intentions. They seem to have honestly believed they were helping the area by making it a future destination for any number of chain stores and restaurants.

Ms. Nicholson, in her ingenuousness, managed to solicit from Mr. Sitt, and from Coney-area City Councilman Domenic Recchia, a cascade of brand names that Coney “needs” in order to be made whole: Dave & Busters, Williams-Sonoma, Build-a-Bear, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Howie’s Game Shack, Cold Stone Creamery, The NBA Store, Barnes & Noble, Applebee’s, TGI Friday’s, The Gap, Duane Reade.

“Does everything have to be a brand?” Ms. Nicholson lamented in a phone interview. The director is no revolutionary, but in her day job she works as an advertising art director and very much understands the value of brands. “Coney Island is the antithesis of all those things,” she added.

And as such, it had come to work very well as an amusement area again in its own ragged, enduring way—a place that offered all the anarchic spirit of the 1970s with almost noneof the crime. Coney served up a unique array of cheap, family-friendly entertainments, from minor-league baseball to the aquarium, the beach to the Cyclone, Nathan’s Famous to Dick Zigun’s geek shows to ... the Zipper. The Parks Department’s own figures showed beach attendance rising from 1.9 million in the summer of 2000 to a peak of 15.6 million by 2006.

Coney Island was working. But it didn’t have a Dave and Busters, you see, or a Howie’s Game Shack, so working people who poured their whole lives into the place had to go. Mr. Miranda works in private security in Florida, and the ride was shipped to Honduras.

We’ve been here before. Coney once had a vibrant, year-round community and a business district along Mermaid Avenue to go with it. Both were largely annihilated by another of Robert Moses’s daft schemes. But hey: 50, 60 years later, here’s the government to help us again.

The Alliance for Coney Island is something of a spinoff of the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), another of the largely unaccountable “public” authorities that Moses pioneered. Backing it is the perennially tunnel-visioned coterie of developers and their construction-union allies, who would tear down the old Penn Station all over again if they had the chance.

Riding herd on them, supposedly, is our elected city council, which to judge from their campaign literature is composed almost exclusively of lifelong community activists. Yet these ceaseless doers of good deeds, supposedly born of the 1960s grassroots tradition, voted 42-2 to okay the gentrification of Coney Island. Why? Because it’s the council’s habit never to interfere with any member’s pet project, and Councilman Recchia wanted this done.

We can only be glad, I guess, that it wasn’t his pleasure to tear down the Verrazano Bridge. All three of these “progressive” traditions—the independent public authority, the “run the government like a business” movement exemplified by our billionaire mayor and the grassroots activism—got their starts many years ago challenging the choking corruption of the old political machines. But when it came to sustaining one of the city’s most iconic neighborhoods—and the working people who kept it alive—they behaved as rancidly as the worst old Tammany Hall hacks. And all in the service of a vision that Brooklyn might one day be as bland and sterile as any suburban mall!

Now Sandy has changed everything. Good luck getting flood insurance now for all those planned condo towers. But no matter what becomes of Coney Island, our leaders go on mindlessly turning New York into a city that none of the rest of us, rich or poor, condo-owner or carny operator, really wants.

editorial@observer.com

Kevin Baker's 1999 novel Dreamlandwas set in turn-of-the-century Coney Island.  

Only a few days after Sandy terrorized the Eastern Coast and before droves of generous volunteers began their efforts to rebuild the seaboard, the damage done by the hurricane was visible against the landscapes of the region.

Coney Island, in particular, was littered with refuse from the Atlantic: the remnants of people's homes, lives and everything else that was ripped away from them.

The residents of the community painfully packed their drenched belongings on the sidewalks, mattresses, toys and memories, while the boardwalk with its shuttered storefronts was left largely abandoned.

On Friday, business owners and photographic tourists pounced on the historic beachfront to assess the damage.

Nathan's Famous workers swabbed the sidewalk and packed up dozens of bags of rotten food while intrepid shutterbugs mulled over the broken and beaten objects that lined the shore.

Families traversed the beach, stopping at children's cribs, upturned rowboats and even marooned Jet Skis, to take portraits and document their own experience with the storm.

The New York Observer captured this strange moment before the cleaning truly commenced and long after Sandy had passed to find Coney Island perfectly preserved in a moment of chaos and calm.

“We’re short-handed today,” said Gus, a tall, broad-shouldered guy who looked excited by the fact.  “I like the challenge. It’s been busy, busy. All day long. All the emergency personnel, you know?”

Around us, I counted at least five staff working the front of the house. Then there was Gus himself, of course, plus whoever else was working the grills in the back. Still a pretty good turnout during a hurricane, right?

“It’s okay. It’s okay. They...” but Gus never had time to finish the thought. The phone is ringing again with another order. Three hamburgers, well done, with bacon, cheese and fried onions. It’s a cop order, one that will be picked up.

“Five minutes,” said Gus.

“The cops were in here in the morning, busting my balls. Telling me, ‘Gus, You gotta close. You gotta close.'” Gus likes to punctuate his sentences with staccato repetition. He hadn’t stood still since I walked in, always watching the door, the windows. Outside a squad car pulled up, the two policemen pushing their shoulders against the car doors, against the wind, as they stepped out. “I told the cops,” said Gus, “If I go home, where are you going to eat?”

The argument must have worked. Because outside, the signs of Sandy’s increasing strength were everywhere. The rain had started to come across the avenue outside in sheets, picking up debris as it moved, pushing up toward the Parkway. Threatening to become just another piece of debris was The Parkview's own sign, fixed at the top of a 30-foot steel mast twisting in the wind.

“We’re in the Zone here,” said Norma with a laugh. She was one of the waitresses who managed to make it in, but she, like Gus, had been looking out the windows. “I hope Gus will let us go home soon. He'll drive us home if he has to. But when I see the sign start to move, I go home.”

Norma took a call in Spanish and gave Gus some bad news. One of the busboys wouldn't be able to make in tonight. He was on his bike.

“Why?” said Gus. A question that Norma only shrugged off, gesturing outside the windows.

“Nobody has a work ethic, that’s why,” he said.

When another waitresses hedged over the phone about how late the diner will be open, it was Gus who yelled from the back, “Tell them we’re open to five. Always tell them five.”

I asked Gus if he was at all worried about the storm.

“I’m not worried. This energizes me. I love it,” he said. “I mean, I worry about my employees. I want to make sure they get home safe. But I like it like this. I’m an adventurer.”

He wasn't the only one.  Earlier, I'd seen two men with surfboards jump into the water near the Seagate properties just west of Coney Island.  They were chasing a tight left-hand break that was crashing off of a granite jetty, all of which looked just suicidally dangerous to me. And in the Rockaways, too, I met numerous people waiting to meet the storm head-on, including the residents of New Gloria's Manor and Home, one of the area's numerous shorefront assisted-living facilities.  I asked one man sitting outside, a man who chose not to identify himself, for his reaction to the evacuations.

"I never heard [the evacuation order]," he said. "I don't think it will be that bad.  Just a little rain.  The water won't come over the boardwalk. Not like in the ’80s when it was water clear across, from the bay to the shore. That was bad."

Run to the supermarket. Run to the hills. But for some of us, it would appear, this storm is just another adventure to be faced head-on. Personally, I was happy to pay the $3.25 toll to get back across the The Gil Hodges-Marine Parkway Bridge and back into Brooklyn proper, which is how I found myself at the Parkview Diner with a delicious cheeseburger deluxe in front of me.

I thanked Norma for the meal and shook Gus’s hand. I asked him if he would be open tomorrow.

“Absolutely. Absolutely. Even if nobody makes it in, I’ll be here,” said Gus.

On my way out, I heard Norma telling him that she wasn’t sure she’d be able to make it in. She wants to see how bad the storm is first.

Gus had barely finished bagging up the policemen’s order, just rushed out of the kitchen, before he was answering her, “No. No, Norma. I need you here. It’s busy, busy.” He interrupted himself as I opened the door. “Stay safe out there,” he yelled.

You too, Gus. You too.

The Thunderbolt in 1995.

Called “the People’s Playground,” Coney Island is perhaps the most popular piece of New York City’s entertainment puzzle, Times Square and the Bowery having been thoroughly scrubbed of any excitement the past few decades. Chic and refined it’s not—at least not yet—but in terms of crowds, ice cream cones, corn dogs and cheap(ish) amusements, this corner of the city is the one calling.

The season may be over, but the enthusiams persists.

Today, the city's Economic Development Corporation announced an RFP seeking the development and operation of new amusement rides, game booths and other entertainment attractions at a vacant site at the heart of the Coney’s amusement hub.

The site, located along West 15th Street between the boardwalk and Surf Avenue, formerly home to the famed Thunderbolt roller coaster, is approximately 45 feet wide by 860 feet long; it is nestled neatly between newly expanded Scream Zone—now featuring a go-cart track and the Boardwalk Flight sky-coaster alongside its four rides for the thrill-seekers among us—and the soon to be Steeplechase Plaza, a 2.2-acre space that will house the restored B&B Carousel, Coney Island’s last remaining historic carousel.

Seth W. Pinsky, President of NYCEDC, commented, “The activation of the West 15th Street site will further expand the amusement core, and build on the ongoing revitalization taking place in Coney Island.” It will also continue the revitalization that the opening of Scream Zone and Luna Park has prompted over the past three years.

“America’s Favorite Playground,” as Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz called it, is a major attraction; the summer of 2011, was one of its most successful seasons to date, with over 640,000 visitors taking over 2 million rides.

“The launch of this site will further propel Coney Island as New York’s premier tourist destination,” said Domenic M. Recchia Jr., councilman for Coney Island and City Council finance chair. Ms. Markowitz concurred: “Its redevelopment will mean even more places to see and more things to do at Coney Island.”

The Coney Island Revitalization Plan will both preserve and nurture this affluent amusement area; it will open up retail opportunities for its neighborhood, with nearly 5,000 new units of housing, and it will generate more than 25,000 construction jobs and 6,000 permanent ones. The plan is expected to generate more than $14 billion in economic activity for New York City over 30 years.

The cards are on the table; we just have to wait for Oct. 23 to see them.

Wavy gravy. (NY Aquarium)

Fun out of the sun.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg took a stroll down the boardwalk this afternoon to the New York City Aquarium in Coney Island, where he announced that new city and private funds would help pave the way for an expanded aquarium, complete with a fancy new shark tank.

“From the start, the exciting expansion and renovation of the New York Aquarium has been a vital part of our efforts to revive Coney Island,” Mayor Bloomberg said. “The project is going to make the Aquarium much more visible and visually exciting to Coney Island’s thousands of visitors—from those strolling the Boardwalk to others visiting the Aquarium itself."

The aquarium has changed little since it first opened in 1957 on the boardwalk, and while this latest expansion will not be quite as big as one planned six years ago, it is an improvement over an earlier scaled-down proposal that contained little more than a shark tank.

A shark tank remains at the heart of this one as well, but it is one serious tank, with 500,000 gallons of water and 115 species inside a new 57,000-square-foot exhibit building. A new striking façade is meant to make the building a real attraction as it faces off with the ever-expanding Luna Park next door.

The city pitched in $93 million, up from $49 million two years ago, and the Wildlife Conservation Society is kicking in the remaining $33 million, of which $11 million has been raised. Part of that is a $7.5 million donation from society trustee Barbara Hrbek Zucker and her husband, Don Zucker, that was announced today.

As always, Marty Markowitz had something clever to say: “Usually, the cry of ‘shark!’ means fewer visitors to the waterfront, but here in Brooklyn, it’ll mean more!”

A Javits casino? Don't bet on it. (Inhabitat)

After years of opposition, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has decided to roll the dice on Governor Andrew Cuomo's dream of opening a casino in New York City. There is just one house rule, according to the Daily New's Albany bureau chief Ken Lovett: not in my backyard. (He's just as parochial as his constituents!)

The locations Silver is open to a casino include Coney Island—where Borough President Marty Markowitz desperately wants one—the new Mets megamall at Willets Point and the so-far-failed plans for one at Aqueduct. But proposals like Times Square and at a rejiggered Javits Center are definitely out.

Some insiders want a casino to be part of a redevelopment of the Jacob Javits Convention Center on the West Side. But Silver remains adamant about keeping gambling dens out of Manhattan and other densely populated parts of the city, the source said.

Lovett's source claims “one or two other sites (in the city) could pop up as we move forward," and it also remains quite possible no casino could win the support of the Legislature.

Meanwhile, another Albany bureau chief, the Post's Fred Dicker, reveals that the Legislature is willing to alientate land in Flushing Meadows (an act that always requires state approval) to make way for an MLS soccer pitch to be built there.

This would be a boon for the Mets megamall, but another loss for the West Side of Manhattan, where it was hoped an MLS stadium might help prop up a collapsing Pier 40, along with the rest of the funds-starved Hudson River Park. So much for that.

This weekend, Mr. D'onofrio and his family--eight members total, including wife Carin van der Donk and their three children, Leila, Elias, and Luka --took home first place for "mixed category" in Coney Island's Sand Sculpture contest, which was co-sponsored by Astella and the WCS/NY Aquarium.

According to DNAInfo.com, which has photos from the event, Mr. D'onofrio's team created an elaborate treasure hunt with their grainy particles. It included " an elaborate treasure chest that was guarded by sand skeletons, and decorated with gold coins."

Check out the other winning sculptures, courtesy of Astella Development.