Has Coney Island finally been saved from decades of dereliction? From the crowds mobbing the beach for the Fourth of July festivities you’d certainly think so. Coney’s beguiling combination of participatory fun (such as Nathan’s hot-dog eating contest) and old-time spectacle (like the Burlesque Circus) is unmatched anywhere else in New York.
Its real showpiece is the gorgeous beach. Manhattan artist Simon Levenson, who has been painting and photographing Coney for several years, points out that “if you remove the beach from the neighborhood, it becomes the visual equal of Santa Barbara’s or East Hampton’s.”
Yet while the beach is breathtaking, most of its nearby man-made structures are small, gloomy and ramshackle. What is to be done? Some Coney Island advocates thought they had a solution: Landmark as much of the neighborhood as possible to restore Coney’s essence.
Two important Manhattan cultural institutions — the Municipal Art Society and the New York Landmarks Conservancy — joined with devoted neighborhood missionaries to urge the Bloomberg administration to carve a historic district out of the amusement area. The immediate danger in early May was that Thor Equities, a real estate company that owns several buildings on Surf Avenue, had announced that they would begin demolition.
Despite the threat, the Landmarks Preservation Commission quickly declined to designate the district, saying the buildings had been too altered, and therefore failed to meet their criteria.
Thor CEO Joe Sitt, who calls himself a preservationist, agrees, saying that his company “stayed away from all historically significant properties” when buying land in Coney. He adds that when Thor sold a chunk of land and air rights to the city for $97 million in December 2009, “We kept only those sites that the city wanted to see developed.”
In some ways, both sides — advocates and developer — are right. Coney has to stay special or die — and that means calling on the best of its historic heritage. So much has been wantonly destroyed — the Giuliani administration, for example, demolished the privately owned Thunderbolt roller coaster in Steeplechase Park in 2000 without bothering with a hearing — that Coney fans are rightly apprehensive about any further destruction.
Yet the disputed Thor-owned buildings — Henderson’s Music Hall, for example, or the Bank of Coney Island — charming and retro though they are, are surely not worthy of individual landmark designation. The Renaissance Revival Coney Island Theater Building, now known as the Shore Theater, might be a good landmarks candidate, but it’s one of the few.
The truth is that New York’s landmarks laws and regulatory apparatus weren’t really set up for a place like Coney Island.
Carol Clark, associate professor of architecture planning and preservation at Columbia University, suggests that the city look instead to “neighborhood conservation ordinances,” used by about a hundred cities across the country. “These ordinances aren’t as restrictive as ours,” Clark says, “and are particularly useful in recognizing and protecting vernacular housing or neighborhoods, like Coney, with a distinct physical character.”
In cities ranging in size from Dallas to Cambridge, Mass., conservation districts protect traits such as architectural style, neighborhood densities, building heights and setbacks. But they do not emphasize preserving individual structures as they were originally built. Rather, conservation strives to maintain a district’s special sense of itself. Modern buildings developed in a style that honors history.
Coney has been battered near unto death over the decades by nearly every urban ill — drugs, violent crime, graffiti, filth, vacant lots, sheer ugliness, you name it. Having overcome so much, today it has another moment in the sun. Yet its future is murky. A historic conservation approach that allows residents and owners to balance Coney’s vitality and funkiness with its need for investment and change could help it stay Coney — except prosperous.
Julia Vitullo-Martin is director of the Regional Plan Association’s Center for Urban Innovation.