Next week 19,000 guests from 90 countries will descend on Cannes, France, for MIPIM, a four-day event that roughly translates as "International Market for Real Estate Professionals" featuring speaking panels and networking opportunities that allow developers to shop major new projects to prospective tenants and investors.

Greetings from Cannes.

The conference is considered the biggest of the year on the global real estate event schedule. But in Manhattan’s tight knit, somewhat-insular real estate community, few know of it.

“I am not familiar with Mipim???” One developer with a major new speculative office building rising out of the ground emailed The Commercial Observer when questioned whether he was going.

The developer wasn’t the only one in the dark. Several prominent real estate executives interviewed by The Commercial Observer either weren’t familiar with the conference or weren’t planning to go.

Of course not everyone was taking a pass. The Related Companies and Oxford Properties, partners in the massive development project planned for the West Side rail yards, is setting up a booth at MIPIM, a source at the partnership said. Brookfield Properties, the real estate investment trust that has a competing large-scale development known as Manhattan West nearby is going to have executives attend. A person at the REIT said that it will be sending the company’s head of development based out of Britain, not New York executives like Related and Oxford are sending to represent the rail yards.

My-Lan Cao, MIPIM’s director of press said that the large real estate services companies Jones Lang LaSalle, Cushman & Wakefield and CBRE would all have professionals at the event. She ceded that the list of New York names was short, but that a few high profile companies would be there, revealing that Thor Equities, the real estate investment company run by Joseph Sitt will be at the conference to give presentations on the Takashimaya Building, the roughly 100,000-square-foot Fifth Avenue retail and office building Mr. Sitt bought in 2010 for $140 million and has been trying to lease for near record breaking numbers.

Ms. Cao said that owners - like Mr. Sitt - in search of filling space can tap a global pool of tenants at the event.

The rail yards and Manhattan West will not be alone. Ms. Cao said that several large scale development projects from around the world will be represented at the conference. A proposed $4 billion development outside of Moscow envisioned by the Russian agency, the Skolkovo Foundation, that is being billed as Russia's Silicon Valley for instance will be on display. Skolkovo is seeking partners, capital and developers.

“A number of cities will be there as well, including Paris, London and Berlin,” Ms. Cao added.

Ms. Cao, who is based in Paris, said that city was sending officials to solicit partners in major infrastructure and development projects it is seeking to plan and build in order to improve transit, create business districts and build new housing.

The Middle Eastern country Qatar, which has poured state resources into a large development outside the Olympic Village being built in London for the 2012 Summer Games, is also going to be at MIPIM to show off its project.

Some of the world’s largest capital sources will also be there. Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, one of the largest investment pools, which famously pumped in nearly $7 billion into Citibank during the scary depths of the credit crisis, will be at the show Ms. Cao said.

So will some American money sources such as Lone Star Funds and TPG Capital. Ms. Cao said that the New York real estate financing consultant and equity placement firm Carlton Advisors was also scheduled to attend.

"About six of us are going," said Howard Michaels, chief executive of Carlton Advisors.

Dgeiger@observer.com

Late last week, the Department of Buildings approved demolitions on two buildings: the Shore Hotel, built in 1903, and the Bank of Coney Island, built in 1923, according to advocacy group Save Coney Island. (The permits can be seen here.)

A set of preservation and Coney Island groups had been trying to preserve many of the buildings in the area, some of which are over 100 years old. The rationale was that the buildings were a big part of Coney's historic past, and it shouldn't come at any immediate cost to Mr. Sitt, particularly given that he doesn't have any grand plans for them right now: He just wants to put up one-story taxpayers in their place.

Mr. Sitt, however, had his own plans, and, from his perspective, it might be easier to ready his prime land for any eventual large-scale development (read: amusement-themed hotel) without the old buildings, and the looming threat of landmarking protections.

Here's a statement from Juan Rivero, spokesman for Save Coney Island, politely asking Joe Sitt not to go ahead with demolitions:

We urge Thor Equities to halt its demolition before it does permanent damage to a national treasure ... Thor has the opportunity to emerge as a hero out of this process by sitting down with the city, the Coney Island community, and preservationists to devise a redevelopment plan that utilizes, rather than squanders, these precious historic resources and valuable economic assets. Let's redevelop Coney Island the right way.

Interestingly, the Save Coney Island folks also snapped a few photos this morning of workers doing demolition on another property owned by Mr. Sitt that hadn't yet received permits (at least none on the DOB's Web site): the Henderson Music Hall.

All of this comes as the State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation gave the area a Determination of Eligibility as a historic district, a designation that might enable landlords to qualify for tax credits to develop in the area while incorporating the existing historic structures.

That, however, might not be of much use, should the wrecking ball indeed make its way to Coney.

ebrown@observer.com

Just in time for summer, the Brooklyn developer announced that he plans to demolish the buildings he still owns in the storied, if gritty, amusement district, and start construction on simple—presumably cheap—(temporary) one-story retail in its place.

In fairness to Mr. Sitt, his goal is to get his new retail open in time for the summer of 2011, and he says he would have to start demolition now to meet that deadline. (The current buildings, mostly along Surf Avenue, host a variety of small food and game vendors.) And these buildings would, in theory, be placeholders, readying the site for more year-round programming in the future.

But the renderings he released, touting his $10 million investment, seem almost designed to inspire distaste. Renderings, by their nature, are fabrications, and developers often put pictures of whatever people want to see (such as gigantic roller coasters that will never be built). Mr. Sitt has gone the other direction, choosing instead to highlight the potential for fast food, slapping a Burger King-like joint on the corner, next to a taco restaurant with signage highly suggestive of Taco Bell.

From a statement put out by Mr. Sitt: 

With the work we are commencing today, by Memorial Day, 2011, all of our parcels along Surf Avenue are scheduled to be activated with family-friendly games, food, shopping and other activities that visitors to, and residents of, Coney are clamoring for.... 

Upgrading and transitioning the local decaying and outdated infrastructure into a modern playground for the world will take time and investment, but with the City's direction and help we know we can get there.

The thinking, presumably, is that these new buildings would fetch decent rents, and can go up and down with relative speed, allowing Mr. Sitt to replace them rather quickly with larger hotels or other development if and when he is able to go forward on larger developments. When the city rezoned the area late last year, it struck a deal with Mr. Sitt to buy his property close to the boardwalk, and leave him development sites along Surf Avenue, further away from the water. 

ebrown@observer.com

On Palm Sunday, the Coney Island Cyclone will clank, sputter and tilt into motion, careening its shrieking cargo around clattering curves and ushering in the new season. The whole neighborhood, rusty gears and all, will churn into motion, the same way it has for years. And like every other season in recent memory, the death of Coney Island—foretold for decades by disgruntled developers, reporters and Mermaid Paraders alike—will be deferred to a later date.

But this year the quiet sigh of recognition that comes each spring, that, yes, the place is still there, after all, is different. This summer, the first new rides will appear since the dismantling of Astroland, and with them, many have declared the coming of a new Coney Island, a Coney Island risen, reborn. A few have even called off the decades-old ritual of promising the near and certain end.

New Yorkers forecast the deaths of neighborhoods, scenes, avenues, authenticity. But the Coney Island doomsday prophecy has become a rite all its own. Coney Island, it long seemed, was always just a season away from swift and utter extinction. Carny barkers and snake charmers were a dart toss from the unemployment line. Bold new development plans were perpetually spelling apocalyptic doom. And through it all, Coney Island groaned on.

Because as much as New Yorkers like to eulogize its corners, the city won't stay still long enough. The unchanging law of eight million is relentless, unceasing change itself. On Coney Island, history is not a tale of reinvention so much as absolute obliteration and genesis. A pronouncement from The New York Times: "Coney Island is regenerated, and almost every trace of Old Coney Island has been wiped out. Frankfurters, peanuts, and popcorn were among the few things left to represent the place as it was in the old days." That was 1904.

But even Coney Island's convulsive trajectory, its shriek-inducing drops and hairpin turns, has left behind a few embalmed bits of history, which every now and then kick up the dust of dime museums come and gone. Among them is the Grashorn Building, a largely unremarkable structure on Surf Avenue. Once home to Grashorn's Hardware, the building stands as the oldest remaining relic of early Coney Island's slapdash wonderland. In its heyday, the hardware store churned out bolts, nails, rivets and enough timber to prop up legions of gaudily painted sham worlds.

More recently, Joe Sitt acquired the site, a small speck on the acres of Coney Island he bought up over the last decade for a glittering development called Dreamland, a proposed Vegas-style playground—part resort, part retail extravaganza—that never actually materialized. Though after a prolonged and lengthy battle, he sold most of his land to the city in late 2009, Mr. Sitt still retains some properties, including the Grashorn Building, vacant up until now.

Last month, Texan showman John Strong III announced plans to relocate his freak show to the former hardware shop, which he will lease from Mr. Sitt. This season will be the showman's second on Coney Island, and like last year, he has been vocal in his challenge to sideshow rival and unofficial Coney Island mayor Dick Zigun, who was critical of Mr. Sitt in his long standoff with the official New York mayor. Though the standoff is over, the carny fighting words perhaps hint at the uncertainty that persists over the island's future and the tension between public and private enterprise that has hung over its history.

This summer's heralded Luna Park, contracted out by the city to multinational park operator Zamperla, is a temporary stand-in for the city's ultimate revitalization, which could take years, even decades to be realized. In the meantime, it's not so much a new Coney Island, a regenerated Coney Island, or a Coney Island back from the dead. It's a Coney Island with a few things new and many things the same. The frankfurters, peanuts, and popcorn are still there.

BY THE MID-19TH CENTURY, Coney Island was a sanctuary for fugitives fleeing Manhattan -high-class fugitives seeking an exclusive enclave as well as fugitives of a more illicit sort. Manhattan elites set up a refined resort on the peninsula's east end, drawn to its isolated swaths of nature where the only population density was a profusion of rabbits. Meanwhile, on the west end, a criminal element gathered to escape the oversight and regulation of the city. From the start, the island oscillated between extremes—at once a "Sodom by the Sea" and a highbrow "City of Light"—with moral and class-based tensions not always easy to disentangle.

The completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 obscured Coney Island's original function as an enclave, though that aim never departed entirely. With the arrival of mass transit, bathhouses and an early version of the hot dog, the masses of a new industrial age descended on Coney Island and filled it with pleasure-seeking thrills: vaudeville houses, saloons and mechanical rides. The enclave was forced to transform, as Rem Koolhaas put it, from an exclusive "provision of Nature to the citizens of the Artificial" to—still offering contrast—its own world of the "Super-Natural."

Serving up the pasteboard and nails of this transformation was Grashorn's Hardware, founded in 1898. Its wood-framed building dates back to the 1880s, and according to the Municipal Art Society, its original clapboards are likely salvageable, secreted away beneath synthetic siding. Beneath all the accrued layers of time, the early mansard roof with dormer windows is still intact.

The owner of the hardware shop, German-born Henry Grashorn, was a prominent presence among the island's growing business community. A group of largely German business leaders, according to Charles Denson's Coney Island: Lost and Found, banded together at the turn of the century in an effort to shift the enclave away from its "Sodom by the Sea" reputation. They were also eager to protect their interests, as state intervention was threatening to do away with the horse-racing tracks and thereby, it was feared, the rich visitors who patronized them. Even more worrying, the state was making repeated overtures regarding its right to the waterfront property, where it hoped to open a public beach. (At the time, only patrons of various waterfront establishments could visit the seaside.)

Grashorn became a founding member of the Coney Island Taxpayers Alliance, a group comprised of business leaders that sought to, in its own words, "raise the moral tone of Coney Island and try to do away with low dives and places where rowdyism prevails." They were aided in this endeavor by the great Bowery fire of 1903, which consumed much of Coney Island's ramshackle center. The blaze of reconstruction that followed, which Grashorn played no small role in, was billed as a "New Coney Island."

On the far western end of the island, where, as Munsey's magazine put it in 1905, things were "most vulgar and squalid," George Tilyou built his enclosed Steeplechase Park, a den of family-friendly amusements named for its mechanical horse tracks. Saddled atop metal horses, riders raced around an undulating track, traversing rivers and all manner of synthetic landscapes. "If Paris is France," Tilyou said, "Coney Island, between June and September, is the world." To enter this world, visitors passed over mechanical flooring that simulated an earthquake, toppling its patrons to the floor.

Another popular Steeplechase attraction, a ride called Trip to the Moon, was created by the young duo Fred Thompson and Skip Dundy. When they decided they weren't being compensated fairly by Tilyou, Thompson and Dundy used elephants to haul their contraption to the site of another park, then bankrupt. (Later, one of the elephant herd's more spirited members, Topsy, was electrocuted by Thomas Edison.) The two opened Luna Park in 1903, an "Electric Eden" of minarets, domes, turrets, "architecture of every known and many unknown species," as a Times reporter observed in 1908. The towers multiplied by the year, sprouting into an early incandescent skyline and presaging Manhattan's vertical density. In 1907, there were 1,326 towers by Thompson's count, all lit up by more than a million bulbs.

After four years, the total number of visitors to the park exceeded 60 million. "Capitalists, catching the point of the Luna Park experiment, piled in their money to get a share of the profits," said Munsey's. One such capitalist was the former state senator and real estate speculator W.H. Reynolds, who envisioned a park on an even grander scale called Dreamland. Within the park's pristine white walls, Reynolds assembled finite worlds within worlds. There was Lilliputia, a small-scale village populated by 300 little people built with exacting detail—even, The Times reported, "to its midget Chinese laundrymen." An early incubator housed premature babies from nearby hospitals, and sham fires were continually put out by sham firemen.

For all the worlds built and destroyed on Coney Island, the hardware shop that churned out the requisite slats and scaffolding remained standing, impervious to the real blazes that consumed Dreamland in 1911 and later Luna Park, too. Despite objections from the Taxpayers Alliance, city officials built Coney Island's first public bathhouse adjacent to the scorched Dreamland site, a collection of tumbledown shacks still selling beer and popcorn. The success of the public bathhouse coupled with Dreamland's mess of debris fueled the city's determination to create a public shoreline. The years that followed brought a series of protracted battles between public and private interests, though, of course, Coney Island never stopped for those, either.

LATELY, OLD CONEY Island rivalries—Dreamland, Luna Park, municipal interests—have taken on new meanings. In some ways it's just a matter of old names yanked up again, revived, but they're also names that speak to still potent tensions and their ideological inheritance. Coney Island has always been a place of reinvention, though in talking about its future, we can't seem to get away from the "old Coney Island," whatever that may be. It's more a question of which old Coney Island we'd like it to be. A private Coney Island or a public one? Sodom by the Sea or City of Light?

Amid all the noise and the mad swirl of change, there has been a recent push for the city to landmark a number of early Coney Island structures, the Grashorn Building among them. Joe Sitt has not typically been amenable to the landmarking of his buildings, though if there's ever a testament to Coney Island as an incubator of developers' dreams, that strange urge to manufacture worlds within worlds, it's the Grashorn Building.

It may be, though, that the world we seek now in Coney Island is not the space-age world of Astroland or the supernatural spheres of Luna Park and Dreamland, not the vague new Coney Island promised by mayor after mayor at all. That old drive to experience new and condensed worlds is still there, it's just that technology has refracted us all into different ones—the gears and lever of mechanical simulations replaced by pixels and screens, freak shows upstaged by reality TV.

Maybe we citizens of the artificial aren't looking for an enclave of nature or even the supernatural anymore, but just an enclave of the real. It's not a Trip to the Moon we want so much as the return trip, the boomerang of centripetal force, connecting us to the dingy, crackling familiar. It hasn't exactly hurt Coney Island that the place, like a tireless stuntman, a perpetual trickster, always seems close to vanishing. Sometimes that makes it all the more real.

Steeplechase had its earthquake, Luna Park a volcano, and Dreamland a perpetual blaze. All these years later, we keep taking the train out to the city's most outward limits, the absolute end of the line, to experience, however briefly, something close to destruction, to see just how real things become before they disappear. The show's always just about to start.

egeminder@observer.com

Lord & Taylor, one of the most successful and enduring department store brands, was known for its female elevator operators at one time. The operators on one side of the building were redheads, while those on the other were brunettes.

The (clearly innovative) retailer's third instantiation in New York City was at the gorgeously ornate 901 Broadway, a building whose architecture has been described as reminiscent of that of Prague. One of the earlier buildings in New York City to be declared a landmark, 901 Broadway is one of the most architecturally unique buildings still standing in Manhattan. But, like many real estate stories here, this one could easily have ended unhappily.

The five-story cast-iron building, finished in 1870, right before the Prussians demolished the Second French Empire that inspired its design, was built on the site of a private residence to house Lord & Taylor, at the time an upscale dry goods store.

Lord & Taylor had, in 1869, entered into an agreement with Robert and Peter Goelet to occupy the property at 895-899 Broadway, and with the Badeau family for the corner lot at 20th Street and Broadway, according to the archives of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The Goelets and Lord & Taylor hired James H. Giles, a Brooklyn architect, to design 901 Broadway. The architect ignored the fashion of the times, eschewing the imitation stonework generally used for cast-iron buildings of the era, and received rave reviews. "The building under consideration is honest-proclaims itself to be iron at a glance. Its wealth of filigree acknowledges with all honesty what it is made of, and could not have been done in stone for millions," said an 1870 New York Times review.

The Goelets were among New York City's most significant real estate developers, erecting architecturally important buildings such as the Goelet Building (894-900 Broadway), the Gorham Building (889 Broadway) and the Judge Building (110-112 Fifth Avenue). Robert Goelet was the director of Chemical Bank, which would later become Chase Manhattan.

The Sixth Avenue portion of Ladies' Mile served middle- and working-class commuters; the Fifth Avenue shopping section was less noisy and cleaner, the precursor to what is now still the most expensive retail space per square foot on earth. This area spilled over onto Broadway and catered to the wealthier clientele of the "carriage trade," according to New York University historian Mosette Broderick. Lord & Taylor, still a high-end retail concern, is the only remaining brand from Associated Dry Goods Inc. and later May Department stores, once major retail conglomerates.

The building constructed for it has endured as well.

Lord & Taylor's cachet helped Broadway north of Union Square to develop into a retail destination. Within its first three days, more than 10,000 people rode the store's steam-powered elevators, then a novelty. Selling men's and women's clothing, carpeting and cloth, Lord & Taylor also pioneered new concepts, such as merchandising (the store had the first Christmas display windows). The company took over neighboring 893 Broadway in 1907, when Morrison & Son, another dry goods company, moved uptown, altering the ground-floor storefront on Broadway to match its adjoining building at 895-901 Broadway.

But the retailer had built a small kingdom destined to decay. In 1915, Lord & Taylor departed to its current location, at 38th and Fifth Avenue, following the inevitable flow of retail further uptown. After their departure, both 893 and 901 Broadway were used for manufacturing and fell into obscurity for the better part of the century.

With its mansard roof and intricately ornamental exterior, 901 Broadway was an obvious candidate for landmark status, which it received in 1977. But by 1987, it was the focus of a Times piece highlighting the lack of financial incentives for owners of landmarked buildings to continue their sometimes very expensive upkeep. "Almost by definition, a landmark incorporates craftsmanship and features that are exceedingly difficult to replicate. Consequently, the cost of historically accurate repair work can be staggering." The owner at the time, Saul Gordon, was letting the building decline rather than hire highly skilled labor. The millions it would cost to restore "would be out of sync with the building's limited economic potential as a 118-year-old loft building."

But the tide turned for that area, unquestionably. By 1995, new owner Darius Sakhai was replacing the storefronts and restoring the building's upper facade. At the time, the building was occupied only by a nightclub on the ground floor.

The developer of Coney Island fame, Joseph Sitt, acquired 901 Broadway in 2006 for $17.375 million through his Thor Equities. In a quiet and surprising transaction in the late summer of 2009, Mr. Sitt sold it to a Spanish businessman, a mysterious self-described "industrialist," for nearly $25 million, according to The Real Deal. That put the sale at $1,715 per square foot, a staggeringly high price for investment sales in post-Lehman Manhattan. The new owner has not been named, but he paid all cash in a deal that may very well encapsulate a Great Recession trend: first-time foreign buyers picking up New York City buildings with no mortgage.

And 901 Broadway is enjoying renewed retail cachet, despite its dark period in the middle of the 20th century. The ground floor is now occupied by trendy women's clothing retailer Miss Sixty, with the next three floors rented by a gallery. The fifth floor penthouse remains available. Retail asking rents in the Flatiron area, according to CB Richard Ellis' latest report, average $276 per square foot annually.

gvoien@observer.com

Krizia went on to become one of Italy’s most dynamic women-led fashion empires, those bold powerhouses of global prominence and multibillion-dollar industry (Prada, Laura Biagiotti, Alberta Ferretti, to name a few) that highlight the dualities of modern Italian culture, which is as much about Donatella Versace as it is Silvio Berlusconi (pictured).

Its new 4,000-square-foot space at 446 West 14th Street marks Krizia’s foray into the meatpacking district, a move that underscores just how very yesterday’s news the neighborhood’s ultra-chic credentials are these days. Who even remembers its speedy rise from hipster to highbrow on the fashionability index?

“The European invasion into the district continues unabated,” said Joseph Sitt of Thor Equities, who brokered the deal. The meatpacking district, he said, was a “fashion Mecca.”

Krizia was one of the first major Italian fashion lines to debut women’s ready-to-wear fashions. It’s since become known for its ability to achieve looks simultaneously tough and tender that, for all their paeans to high fashion, are also accessible.

The store will open in 2010.

egeminder@observer.com

Mr. Sitt’s Thor Equities is seeking to build a 214,000-square-foot mall highlighted by a BJ’s Wholesale Club, along with space for three other retail stores. The company has filed for a rezoning of the site, a peninsula off Shore Parkway in Bensonhurst. The current use: a bus parking lot.

The plan is now in an early stage of public approval—a “scoping” phase for the environmental review—with a hearing to be held on Oct. 29 at the Department of City Planning.

On its face, the plan seems a bit less controversial than his involvement at Coney Island, where city officials desperately sought to push Mr. Sitt out of the area they wanted to redevelop, offering to buy his land (the two sides have squabbled over a price, and no deal has yet been signed).

At the Bensonhurst site, the players are not all that different: the Department of City Planning is still involved, and the local Councilman, Domenic Recchia, is the same. 

ebrown@observer.com

At the center, still, is Joe Sitt, the chairman of landlord Thor Equities who owns about 5 acres of land in the central amusement district that the city wants to control. He and his team have been meeting with top officials at City Hall for three straight days now in an attempt to strike a deal where the city takes a portion of or the entire piece of land. At least as of earlier Thursday afternoon, there was no deal. The local councilman, Domenic Recchia, has long been pressing for a resolution on this issue before a City Council vote.

There are the labor issues, as a large set of unions (32BJ; the Hotel & Motel Trades Council) each wants wage and other guarantees over future development, and, while everyone involved seems to think deals are likely, they aren’t there yet.

“Everything is fluid,” a union official involved in the discussion said. The Council is responsive to these concerns, particularly as election season nears, when union endorsements can be very helpful in contested elections.

There’s ACORN, the housing group, which is in the midst of negotiating a deal with the city over below-market-rate housing in the area.

AND THEN THERE'S WHAT is by far the loudest group of critics, but probably the least powerful politically: the Coney Island enthusiasts who are, above all else, trying to battle back elements of the Bloomberg plan that they think would ruin the spirit of Coney Island. This voice is not one single group but rather a patchwork of nonprofits involved with the issue (Coney Island USA, Save Coney Island, and the Municipal Art Society) that have similar complaints. They feel the city’s plan has far too little space set aside for new outdoor amusements (just 9 acres), and that a set of hotels in the central amusement zone would destroy the distinct character.

The unions, ACORN and the landlords all seem to be getting a seat at the table with the administration, but these groups seem to be scrambling to gain more attention and make enough noise to be heard (and listened to) as the clock ticks.

The groups have made a clever YouTube video; sent out constant emails urging residents to call their council members and the office of Council Speaker Christine Quinn; posted architectural renderings of an amusement district with hotels; and cobbled together a long list of historians, including filmaker Ric Burns, to criticize the city’s plans.

“The conversation has been understood as this struggle between Thor and the city, and what has been lost in all of that is that the underlying plan would be, as it currently stands, disastrous,” said Juan Rivero of Save Coney Island.

The strategy, Mr. Rivero said, has been to both urge the amusement enthusiast position on Mr. Recchia, and also to pressure other council members, who could, in turn, affect the debate on the issue. In recent days, he and others involved have met with 11 different council members or their aides, he said, urging big changes to the city’s plan.

“The reception has ranged,” Mr. Rivero said. “Some people have been extremely supportive and grasped the issues right away, but it has been qualified by different levels of deference to Domenic.” 

ebrown@observer.com

Mr. Recchia has been generally supportive of Mr. Sitt’s arguments with the city for at least a year now, but at a Wednesday Council hearing, he seemed to stake out a position of clear opposition on a number of topics. At the hearing, Mr. Recchia aimed pointed questions at city officials, many of which matched the set of talking points that Mr. Sitt and his consultants have been reciting in recent weeks, both privately and publicly.

Mr. Recchia’s questions, voiced in a frustrated and at times angry tone, set the stage for a showdown with the Bloomberg administration over its plan, which imagines thousands of new apartments and year-round indoor amusements to accompany a revitalized outdoor amusement zone.

Specifically, he made clear his rejection of the administration’s proposal to classify a portion of the site—including Mr. Sitt’s property—as parkland. That would allow the use of eminent domain on Mr. Sitt’s land (though that’s not the city’s stated intention) and clear the way for more housing on another portion of the site. Mr. Sitt has pushed this point, as his land would presumably be far less valuable and developable with the potential cloud of eminent domain hovering over it, an argument that has won the ear of Mr. Recchia and key elected officials in Albany.

The owner of the neighboring Wonder Wheel, the Vouderis family, has also been concerned about the parkland, and when Mr. Recchia addressed the issue, he did not mention Mr. Sitt directly.

“If the Vouderis family is not happy—if the Wonder Wheel got taken up in parkland, I am recommending we turn this down,” he said of the administration’s plan.

Mr. Recchia also took up a second point that Mr. Sitt has pushed: remove a new planned street from the plan, “Wonder Wheel Way,” which would divide up his parcels and make his land more difficult to develop.

The city has been battling to buy Mr. Sitt’s land for about $100 million, though he has resisted, saying he would lose about $30 million in investment at the site. As no deal has emerged—though the two sides have discussed a compromise proposal with a smaller acquisition—Mr. Sitt and his attorney, Jesse Masyr, have pushed these and other points in an attempt to salvage some value in his property, which he paid over $100 million to assemble.

WHILE IT'S OFTEN A FOOL'S errand predicting just where these development fights end up—council members and city officials tend to stake out extreme positions backed by dramatic rhetoric before meeting somewhere in the middle before a vote—it seemed Mr. Recchia and others on the Council were staking out a path toward a compromise being pushed by Messrs. Masyr and Sitt. That plan involves a few changes to the zoning, including the elimination of Wonder Wheel Way and not designating Mr. Sitt’s land as parkland, though still completing the broader rezoning of the area.

Of course, there are numerous other issues to settle, including affordable housing and a push by unions to wrest numerous concessions from the Bloomberg administration and another private developer to give wage and hiring guarantees.

In all, the issue has turned into a giant headache, and, more broadly, there are a huge number of open questions that the administration is unable to answer now, causing multiple council members to raise larger concerns about the plan’s viability. For one, city officials have said the plan will have to be phased in over at least 10 to 15 years, putting its fate into the hands of future administrations—a concept the Bloomberg administration tries to avoid.

Officials have acknowledged the redevelopment will require hundreds of millions of dollars in investment for acquisitions and infrastructure, such as new water systems, for which they have only a fraction of the necessary money budgeted. The term “pie in the sky” is thrown around frequently by observers and critics, particularly as multiple prior administrations have tried to redevelop and revitalize the area with very limited success.

A peeved Councilwoman Helen Sears offered some criticism in her questions to city officials:

“I think it’s flawed,” she said of the plan. “I think you didn’t answer my question, and I also think that the timeframe of Willets Point and Coney Island is overwhelming. From my perspective, I’m not sure of where all this money is coming from.”

Still, city economic development officials are committed to Coney Island, and they argue that this project has the potential to transform a neighborhood entirely, perhaps bringing billions in investment to an area that is mostly marked by vacant lots. 

ebrown@observer.com