Coney Island

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The City Council approved the Bloomberg administration-backed rezoning of Coney Island on Wednesday afternoon in a 44-2-1 vote peppered with congratulations to Coney Island’s local councilman, Domenic Recchia.

The rezoning would turn vacant lots now zoned for amusements into a residential area, and would allow some hotels, retail and indoor amusements in the central amusement area of the historic entertainment hub. Mr. Recchia said in a press conference before the vote that there could be up to four hotels under the current plan, but he expects that there will most likely be two.

But not everything is finalized. The legislation still has to pass through the chaotic gates of Albany, and negotiations between the city and Thor Equities’ Joe Sitt—the main private landlord in the rezoned area—remain ongoing, though the two long-opposed parties may be close to reaching a final deal.

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Rendering of Bloomberg's Coney Island plans.

The debate over the Bloomberg administration’s plans to remake Coney Island is dashing toward a close, as the City Council is just days away from an expected vote (a subcommittee is tentatively scheduled to vote Monday, though these things often change at the last minute). And, with potentially just days left, city officials are still juggling a panoply of issues and demands raised by the long roster of groups that have come knocking at the administration’s door: landlords in the amusement area, developers who want to build residential, unions, low-income housing groups, amusement enthusiasts.

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.

The debate over the future of Coney Island is something of a hot topic now as the City Council is soon to vote on the Bloomberg administration's plan to bring waterparks, retail and housing to the formerly vibrant amusement hub. 

There's been more than a few critics of the city's plan, with some saying it will ruin Coney Island's spirit and others saying it simply won't work. Here's a slideshow just put together by one of those groups, the Municipal Art Society, a planning-focused civic organization, that outlines its own plan for the area. The biggest difference: the city wants tall hotels in the central amusement zone; MAS says that area should be more of a Central Park-like space, with tall buildings on the surrounding blocks but not within the zone. 

Enjoy. 

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 There’s a common tactic that accompanies most development fights: packing a public hearing.

Usually this is carried out by a variety of groups fighting or supporting a given project—advocates, unions, angry neighbors, wary businesses—who enlist (ideally) scores of people to testify at a hearing in favor of their position, filling a room with sign-holding supporters and making it seem like their argument has more support than the opposition's.

But for a City Council hearing on Coney Island on Wednesday, the Bloomberg administration bused in supporters of its own plan, only to provoke sharp criticism from the Council, as members alleged a misuse of taxpayer funds.

Toward the end of the exhausting hearing—the eight-hour-plus event examined the administration’s plans to redevelop the amusement area—Councilman Simcha Felder asked a person testifying in favor of the city’s plan how he got to the hearing, and learned he had been bused in by the Coney Island Development Corporation, according to multiple people at the hearing. That organization is an economic development arm of city government that focuses on the development and implementation of the Bloomberg plan.

The city's plan to remake Coney

For years now, the Bloomberg administration has been pushing a plan to redevelop Coney Island, trying to ensure its approval in the City Council amid resistance from the amusement district’s main landowner, Joe Sitt. Now, as the Council approaches a vote on the plan in coming weeks, one major line of resistance is emerging: Domenic Recchia, the area’s councilman, is siding with Sitt on almost all of the developer's key points, threatening the administration’s proposal.

Recchia has been generally supportive of 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, Recchia aimed pointed questions at city officials, many of which matched the set of talking points that Sitt and his consultants have been reciting in recent weeks, both privately and publicly.

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.

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James Hamilton

Mr. Recchia.

The fate of the Bloomberg administration’s proposal to remake Coney Island is now in the hands of the City Council and area Councilman Domenic Recchia, who has been critical of key aspects of the plan.

The ambitious proposal, which was approved by the City Planning Commission today, imagines hundreds of millions of dollars in city investment to ultimately revitalize the onetime thriving amusement hub, which has gradually degenerated into a mostly vacant skeleton of its old self.

The plan itself has many hurdles—government funding, the need to attract major investment in an unproven area, a complex zoning scheme that envisions hotel development subsidizing expensive rides—but the most pressing now is Thor Equities, the firm led by landlord Joe Sitt that owns most of the land in the main amusement district. Mr. Sitt, who has previously had the support of Mr. Recchia, is in a standoff with the Bloomberg administration over his land, as the city wants to buy him out. At last check, the two parties were in the neighborhood of $30 million to $60 million apart.

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Coney Island, imagined

In the universe of the city budget, cuts are everywhere.

Nowhere was this more apparent than the city’s capital budget, the decade-long plan that pays for new parks, schools, firehouses, infrastructure and economic development with $47 billion in city funds. The Bloomberg administration is proposing to shrink its capital spending by about $8 billion from an earlier version unveiled last fall, an act that, if approved by the City Council this month, will inspire a wave of cuts for new projects citywide.

But, at least in terms of economic development, two legacy real estate projects that have long been the focus of city officials—the redevelopment of Coney Island and of Willets Point in Queens—have escaped the knife entirely (and in the case of Willets Point, slightly more money was added).

This prioritization of the large and high profile offers a glimpse into the Bloomberg administration’s unabashed fervency regarding mega-development, an approach that has inspired no shortage of critics. While substantial development on these projects is likely many years off and ultimate success is hardly a given, officials argue that Coney and Willets deserve to be at the top of the list because of their potentially transformative effects in two underdeveloped areas.

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Add another obstacle to the Bloomberg administration’s plans to remake Coney Island: a parking lot.

Despite many an overture to election officials in southern Brooklyn, the administration has been unable to get anyone in Albany to carry a bill “alienating,” or declassifying, as parkland a large parking lot for the KeySpan Park baseball stadium, a measure that is central to the city’s plans. And the clock is ticking: The legislative session wraps June 22.

Albany legislators are resistant to act on the Bloomberg administration’s plan before the city reaches a deal with Joe Sitt, the major landowner in the amusement area, who has been sparring with city officials for more than two years now.

The central fight is over private developer Mr. Sitt’s land, which the city has unsuccessfully tried to buy, an issue that has drowned out the numerous other criticisms and unresolved problems with the city’s plan. This act stands to come to a close, in some form, by August, when the City Council must vote to approve or reject the mayor’s plans to remake the amusement hub with new rides, housing and hotels.

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