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Early Addition
Photograph by Tien Mao
Get ready to ride the Cyclone again - Astroland is opening up for the 2008 season this Sunday! There were worries, due to ambitious plans to redevelop Coney Island, that 2007 was Astroland's last season, but Astroland owners, the Albert family, and Thor Equities were able to come to an agreement last October.
As for the future beyond 2008, Carol Albert told amNew York, "There are a lot of unknowns...It's really tough to run a business year to year. There's people's futures on the line. They want to know what's going on."
Astroland will be open on Sunday at noon. Between March 16th and June 8th, it'll be open weekends only (it will be open the week of April 21-25 - public school break). It will be open daily between June 13th and September 1st, and then it will go back to weekends only on September 8th until a date that's still TBD.
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I know people like to hang on to the past like shipwreck victims clinging to flotsam, but Coney Island is a dump. At least with this redevelopment scenario, Thor Equities purchased the land legitimately, rather than using eminent domain to screw people the way the Atlantic Yards project was done.
If Astroland goes, it goes. Something new will take its place, and in fifty years when it's gotten all shitty and someone wants to redevelop it, people will be sobbing over that, too.
I'm assuming you didn't grow up in NY, swbuecheler. Maybe you want to live in a world where people with $$ can buy up whatever piece of history they want and destroy it, but I don't. "Hang on to the past like shipwreck victims?" Maybe you'd also like to dispense with museums -- call up Bruce Ratner and see if he wants to demo the Met and build condos there.
Coney Island is a cheap and relaxing place to hang out. Sure, it is dumpy, but so it most of NYC.
The question is not whether Thor has the right to purchase and develop the site, but rather whether anybody else gets a say on what they actually build. The original plan was condos + indoor water park + mall (= bullshit.)
Ajaja007-
Correct. I grew up in Syracuse. They have a lot of old, crappy buildings and areas up there, too, and slowly but surely the city is tearing them down and replacing them with new things, or reconditioning them and making them attractive and valuable again. I support these efforts wholeheartedly - the reconstruction of Franklin Square alone has been beautiful. They kept the good stuff and razed the bad.
I'm not anti-preservation nor anti-history, actually. I quite appreciate history and I go to museums regularly. I just think that preservation for the sake of preservation is ridiculous. See also: the Domino Sugar factory, which is an eyesore and will continue to be an eyesore in the middle of a bunch of skyscrapers in a few years.
Just because something is old doesn't mean it's inherently historic. It's just old.
Almost all the people crying out to preserve the "historic" Astroland don't live right by it (as I do). It's a dump and depresses the entire area. Just about any replacement would be an improvement. Even a large parking lot would be better.
I'm not sure: somehow keeping that dumpiness (although I live some 32 f.stops away) seems preferable to having the space turned into the real plastic pit that Times Sq. is today. I'm not a Russian, though, nor planning a wedding reception, so I may be out of line.
This has nothing to do with being Russian or looking for party space. Astroland is just short of being as dirty as a junkyard -- it's certainly less useful -- and I don't see many people clamoring to live next to one of those. It's a collection of overpriced rigged games and rides on the verge of collapse. The scary part of riding the Cyclone is wondering whether *this* will be the inevitable catastrophic ride.
Coney Island is a beachside shithole but piece by piece it can become something more. Someone from a distant neighborhood standing in the way just because they have fond memories of eating cotton candy there fifteen years ago or wild imaginings of local "flavor" is just ignorant.
No one here wants a strip mall but Thor Equities haven't proposed that nor would they profit if they built one.
Ignorant? Do you think so?
Ignorant, I’d say, is believing that for-profit developers won’t leech every last ounce of character –good and bad alike– from Coney Island. And if you know of some entity that will improve it "piece by piece," you're one of a kind.
Ignorant is saying that other New Yorkers who are or have been in roughly the same 'commercial' place –living near Times Sq, Atlantic Yards, W125 St, Grand Concourse, the East Village, for example– have no right to express themselves about what happens in Brooklyn tomorrow. You know, the other bleeding hearts living in distant neighborhoods.
Ignorant is using your dad’s rat-tail comb like a shiv when someone speaks his mind in a way that contradicts you.
Frankly, you don't sound very happy to be living where you do, and so I must sound ungracious. Instead, please call us when you’re named co-manager of that new Rabbit Island Applebee’s. Then, or when you find the right place in Todt Hill.
I must've definitely hit a sore spot if in the space of a few paragraphs you managed to devolve from basic ignorance all the way to ignorant real life insults. I could maybe buy an Applebee's but I don't intend to work at one. Thanks just the same but your weak insults are just an example of bad breeding (inbreeding perhaps?).
Removing the trash that is Astroland would be an improvement. Raising cost-of-living here would also be an improvement considering how a bleeding heart like yourself would be found bleeding from the heart, dead in a bin, if you tried to walk through Coney Island at night anywhere west of Stillwell.
Times Square is a great example of a shitty neighborhood reborn into a successful one. Yes, we all miss the fake pot dealers hustling their oregano in front of XXX peep shows, but the memory and the reality of that seedy time don't coincide.
And that's the best you can do in reply? To say that you could buy an Applebee's franchise but would never work in one, cheek-by-jowl with the great unwashed. And that I myself am a product of inbreeding? Really, I expected a smarter response from you -not a clawful of watery mud, thrown awkwardly.
I guess we're even, though: you manage to evade addressing my points, and I get to see at close hand how a MacCain supporter in New York views the world.
It was you that felt a job at Applebee's was a worthwhile insult here. I guess your bleeding heart is only a shallow cut.
Astroland is a blight and most of Coney Island is not much better. It's rare to find so much wasted beachside real estate. Do I trust businesses to be civic-minded? No. There is a community here that is fighting for a say in the development. What many of us here don't like are the cretins demanding Astroland (and Coney Island by extension) remain as they remember it rather than let something new revitalize the area. Like maybe Times Square...although with hopefully a freakier Mermaid Parade feel.
Mccain? You must be shrooming. My vote this year will be for "None of the Above".