POOR MAN’S PARADISE?
By David Lida
Coney Island, the most famous amusement park in the world, has been a magnet for the working class for close to 100 years. One developer may change all that – the same way that a real-estate market in the stratosphere has transformed so much of New York.
The Cyclone
Gerry Menditto has bad dreams.
They don’t occur as frequently as they did 32 years ago, when he became manager of the Cyclone, a roller coaster that, every summer since 1927, has dropped its riders 85 feet at a 60-degree angle at 65 miles per hour. But once in a while he still wakes up in a panic. “You dream about all those things that you’re afraid might happen, that never happen,” he explains. “You see people lying on the tracks. You see cars crashing.”
Except in Menditto’s nightmares, the Cyclone is one of the safest rides in any amusement park in the world, thanks to his diligent attentions and those of his 14-man crew. Coney Island, the beachside amusement park in Brooklyn, New York, where the Cyclone is located, only operates three months a year during the summer, although the roller coaster tends to function an extra month or two. During the rest of the year, the manager and his team perform maintenance chores. “If there’s a screw loose, you tighten it,” he explains.
A ride on the Cyclone costs six dollars and lasts two minutes. When patrons step off, after its abrupt, whiplash-inducing twists, turns and plunges, they tend to feel as if they had been agitated inside the cocktail shaker of an enraged bartender. On a busy Saturday, 5000 people enjoy the ride, while in the middle of the week perhaps 1500 or 1600 climb aboard.
The burly, grey-haired Menditto, 64, grew up in Coney Island and has worked there – as a mechanic, an electrician, and the manager of Astroland, one of its amusement areas – since his teenage years. He has five tattoos. One says Mom, another says Dad, one depicts a rising sun, while another has, he says, “a stupid skull.” The fifth is a drawing of a handshake, above the legend “Coney Island.” He had them applied in 1958.
“I was fifteen years old,” he says. “What can I tell you? When you’re fifteen, you think you’re something that you’re not. As soon as I got them, I started wearing long-sleeved shirts to cover them up.”
As customers board the Cyclone a sign warns them, “Secure hats, wigs and glasses.” Menditto points to a box of items that have been lost over the previous two days: a dozen cell phones, ten pairs of glasses and sunglasses, and several sets of keys. “We get about ten hats a day, a wig every other day. We always try to find them. If they get caught in the wheels of the cars, it’s trouble.”
In all the years he has worked at Coney Island, Menditto has never been on the Cyclone. In fact, he has only been on one ride, called the Caterpillar, which disappeared decades ago. “It was a slow ride,” he remembers. “A girl asked me to go on it.” Each car had an umbrella canopy that enclosed its riders. “When the umbrella covered you up, you made out.”
Today, Coney Island is only a shadow of what it was in its glory days in the first half of the 20th century. There are fewer rides than ever, mostly old, rusty and far less glorious than the Cyclone. There are no restaurants, only cafeterias, and most food offerings would cause anxiety even among the minimally health-conscious. There isn’t a single hotel in the area. On Surf Avenue, the principal street that runs parallel to the beach, various businesses are boarded up. In the middle of the amusement zone, where the Thunderbolt roller coaster stood between 1925 and 2000, there is now an empty lot overgrown with weeds.
In the past three years, a real-estate developer bought close to 80 percent of the land under which the amusement park sits. Soon after, he bulldozed a batting range, where beer-addled, pot-bellied men used to hit baseballs as hard as they could, and a go-kart park, where toddlers tried to bump into each other in metal cars ringed with rubber. Earlier this year, it was announced as a fait accompli that at the end of the summer of 2007, the amusement park would be closed. Today its immediate fate is undecided, but in the next couple of years Coney Island will undoubtedly change significantly.
In 1988, the City of New York gave the Cyclone landmark status. Thus, the roller coaster can never be torn down, sparing Gerry Menditto additional nightmares about losing his job. The Wonder Wheel, a ferris wheel with swinging cars that is 150 feet high and has been in operation since 1920, is also a landmark. So is the Parachute Jump, the 271-foot-tall structure sometimes known as “Brooklyn’s Eiffel Tower”; however the ride hasn’t functioned since the early 1960s. Menditto has contemplated what the Cyclone would be like if it and the Wonder Wheel were the only rides left in Coney Island. “It would be like a ghost town here. Either we would be very, very busy or very, very slow.”
The salesman
“My dream is to build a 21st-century Coney Island with today’s technology and design,” says Joseph J. Sitt, the real-estate magnate who bought most of the amusement zone. “I want to reorganize the park, utilizing both a respect for its history and a bold new vision.” It will have to be vertical rather than horizontal, explains the developer. In its heyday the amusement zone was laid out over 40 acres but today there are only ten. “I want it to be just as outlandish and zany as it ever was.”
When Sitt unveiled his plan in the summer of 2006, it was not only outlandish and zany but unlawful. Apart from high-tech arcades, an indoor ski hill and a roller coaster that went in and out of buildings, the drawings included a tower from which to launch a dirigible and helicopters. Charles Denson, author of Coney Island Lost and Found (the definitive history of the area), says he called the Federal Aviation Association, the government agency that regulates air traffic. He asked about the possibility of granting Sitt permission to fly blimps over Coney Island. “They said it was as likely as letting him land 747s on Surf Avenue,” says the writer.
Yet even more controversial was the magnate’s plan to build a 40-story tower of luxury condominiums abutting the amusement park. According to current zoning laws, residential buildings are not allowed on the beach or boardwalk areas of Coney Island. Across Surf Avenue, the closest buildings are only 20 stories tall. The city government roundly denounced the idea of mixing expensive housing with an amusement park that caters to the working class, and rejected Sitt’s plan.
At first, the developer complained that building a new amusement park is expensive, and without the income from residential properties he wouldn’t be able to consummate his plan. The city didn’t budge, so Sitt came through with a scaled-back version of his diagram that, apart from the amusement park, includes restaurants, a shopping mall, movie theatres and bowling alleys. There are no more apartments, although four hotels are attached. The government’s Coney Island Development Corporation has a plan that isn’t all different from Sitt’s (it can be seen at the agency’s web site at http://www.thecidc.org/). Currently the city is studying the possibility of changing the zoning laws to allow hotels and residences – close to, but not within, the amusement area.
Sitt, 42, wears wire-frame glasses and close-cropped hair. During our interview in his pristine offices near Times Square, he often consults the messages on his cell phone and stops frequently to ask why the readers of this magazine would possibly be interested in the answers to the questions I posed. He has the nervous, kinetic energy of a character in a Woody Allen movie.
Although he refuses to say where, Joseph J. Sitt grew up “right by Coney Island.” In the 1960s, when he was born, the area was beginning what was probably its steepest decline. Drugs and crime were rampant in New York. By the time Sitt reached his teens, the city was bankrupt. Many of Coney Island’s residents at the time were blacks who survived with the benefit of public assistance in government-subsidized housing projects that had been hastily constructed and were poorly maintained. Such populations are traditionally among the most vulnerable to crime.
In an interview with the New York Times, Sitt referred to himself as “a salesman.” Soon after he went into real estate as a young man, he also became a retailer. His vision is a combination of both businesses, and it stems from an excursion he made when he was 12 years old. He wanted an Atari as a birthday present, but in the section of Brooklyn where his family lived, they were impossible to find. He and his mother had to ride the bus and the subway for an hour to more affluent Manhattan to find the toy.
His first real-estate projects involved convincing well-known stores to rent retail space in his buildings, mostly in neighborhoods that, like the Brooklyn of his childhood, were not considered prosperous enough to support those businesses. In 1991 he founded Ashley Stewart, a line of clothing that caters to plus-sized black women, but sold his stake in the company a decade later.
While Sitt tends to paint himself as a hero of urban renewal, critics in the press and the government are skeptical. Charles Denson accuses him of being a “flipper,” someone who buys property and then sells it quickly at a profit. Some fear that “flipping” is his hidden agenda with Coney Island. According to its website, Thor Equities, Sitt’s real-estate company, has ten million square feet of space worth $2 billion. Published reports estimate that he paid between $50 million and $150 million for his Coney Island property (data he refuses to quantify). The developer says his project to revive Coney Island will cost about $1.5 billion, and it was reported that he asked the city to subsidize about $100 million of that amount.
Further reports stated that the city offered Sitt money to buy back his Coney Island landholdings, and when he refused, proposed to trade them for an area just a few hundred meters down the boardwalk (next to Keyspan Park, where the popular minor-league baseball team the Brooklyn Cyclones has played since 2001). Neither the developer nor the government would comment on the negotiations which, as this magazine goes to press, are still ongoing.
Many fear that Sitt will remove of all the rides except for the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel this January. I ask if the other rides will still be there when the season begins next summer. “Some of them will be,” he says. He quickly qualifies: “Something will be there.”
Then and now
To fathom what is at stake for the future of Coney Island, it is instructive – and amusing – to take a look at what was going on during what was supposed to be its final summer this year.
The Circus Sideshow is as good a place as any to begin. Here, in a sweltering barn-like space with tiered benches, a tall, slender, bald-headed man who calls himself Donny Vomit acts as the show’s MC. His specialty is hammering a six-inch nail into his left nostril, an accomplishment he follows up by inserting an even longer masonry bit, buzzing from a Black and Decker electric drill, into the same aperture. Among the other performers are Heather Holliday, a 22-year-old from Utah who is surely the prettiest sword swallower in the history of Coney Island; Jesús Aceves, also known as Chuy the Aztec Wolf Man, a Mexican whose hypertrichosis has covered his face with hair, and who walks a tightrope; and a juggler called Brendan the Pretty Good, who lives up to his name. The most spectacular performer is a profusely tattooed female fire eater. Alternately known as the Queen of Kerosene and the Goddess of Gasoline, she is most frequently called Insectavora, due to the fact that before eating fire, she entertained the public by consuming insects.
This particular sideshow has had a wide audience of tourists, as well as hipsters who arrive by subway from Manhattan, since 1985. Yet in Coney Island’s heyday, there was infinitely more entertainment of this type, including Albert and Alberta (a large individual who was supposedly half man and half woman); the World’s Strangest Married Couple (an enormously fat woman called Princess Lala and a midget); as well as numerous unfortunates who suffered from microcephaly, which resulted in severe mental retardation and disproportionately small heads. These artistes are featured in numerous short films of Coney Island that anyone with internet service can see on the You Tube website.
By the 1960s, exhibiting this sort of person was considered exploitation, and the sideshows practically disappeared; indeed, when the Circus Sideshow was revived here in the 1980s it was seen as an ironic throwback to a bygone era.
Last summer, the Circus Sideshow bought its exhibition space on 12th Street near Surf Avenue, so its future is assured. Stephanie Torres, a curvaceous, wavy-haired performer who wrestles snakes under the name Serpentina, is looking forward to the changes to Coney Island, despite the disruption it might cause the area over the next few years.
“Change is always good,” she says. “It depends on the amount. They’ve let Coney Island get too dilapidated. The city should spend more money here.” She believes that whatever changes are made, there should be no admission charge. “This has always been the Poor Man’s Disneyland. You can take the subway here. You can’t take the subway to Disneyland or to Six Flags.” She is certain that even if the current amusement park disappears, the area will be reborn.
The Circus Sideshow is part of a not-for-profit organization called Coney Island USA (http://www.coneyisland.com/) dedicated to preserving the area’s heritage. In the past couple of decades it has opened a small memorabilia museum which charges an admission of only 99 cents, and sponsors events such as the annual Mermaid Parade, held each July 4th and noted for its bare-breasted contestants. They also hold a Saturday night film series, a tattoo festival, and sponsor a burlesque show each Friday night.
Although resurrected from the past, these cultural offerings are fresher than the rides in the two amusement areas, Astroland and Deno’s Wonder Wheel. There isn’t much going on in either; most rides are for toddlers, who spin in giant teacups or are gently flipped in the air while strapped in seats. There are a few adult rides, such as a fairly lame haunted house called the Spook-a-Rama, and a canoe that slides into a pool called the Water Flume. The latter is a pallid version of a much more spectacular ride called the Shoot the Chute that was introduced at Coney Island’s Luna Park in 1903 (a film of which is available on You Tube).
The only advantage of the amusement area is its low cost – rides cost between three and six dollars each, and there are packages where one can enter all the rides as many times as one wants during six hours for $30. Thus, cash-strapped parents can be heroes to their children for an amount that is, at least in the New York economy, modest.
No one I interviewed could remember the last time a new ride had been introduced, although speculations tended toward the early 1970s. Several recalled rides that had disappeared in recent years, such as the lovely B&B Carousel from the early 1930s, the Magic Carpet Fun House, and the Hell Hole. The latter was the equivalent of being inside a large tin can, and spun around so rapidly that, after the floor dropped out, patrons were held up to the walls by centrifugal force.
The amusement area, redolent of rust, mold and verdigris, clearly needs updating. Author Charles Denson, who spearheads an organization called The Coney Island History Project (http://www.coneyislandhistory.org/), suggests that many old rides could be restored and the amusement park could be a living museum to its former glory. Joseph Sitt and the Coney Island Development Corporation seem to believe that modernizing is the answer, although how an investor could recoup the investment in new rides without charging considerably more money is anyone’s guess.
Gastronomical thrills
Eating at Coney Island is mostly undertaken on foot. Food is exhibited from glass cases that bear a sign saying, “for display only.” It is mind-boggling to consider that anyone might be tempted by the exhibition of lethally oily sausages, kebabs and knishes (Jewish potato pie), or the myriad deep-fried offerings – onion rings, French fries, shrimp, clams and chicken – drowning in grease of dubious provenance.
Next to one of these stands, a man from Puebla, Mexico rents space over which he has posted a sign that says “Tacos El Sabrosón.” An oasis among the mire, Julio dispenses tacos, tortas, cemitas and quesadillas, filled with chorizo, chicken, carnitas or carne asada. “Mexican food has really become popular here,” he says. Few of his clients are Mexicans; most hail from other Latin American countries or the U.S. Julio doesn’t know whether or not he will be in Coney Island next summer. “Every day they tell us another story,” he says. “But last year they said we wouldn’t be here this year.”
The most sublime, and only obligatory, culinary stop for a visitor to Coney Island is Nathan’s, a Surf Avenue cafeteria that has sold exemplary hot dogs and French fries since 1916. It is one of those New York institutions so long established that even most natives are unaware of its history.
It was the creation of Nathan Handwerker, a Jewish immigrant who came to New York by way of his native Poland and Belgium. In 1915, he went to work as a waiter at Feltman’s, at the time Coney Island’s most famous restaurant. Although Feltman’s also served hot dogs, it was the sort of place where customers sat at tables with white cloths. Within a year Nathan had saved $300 – in part, from eating Feltman’s hot dogs – and opened up Coney Island’s first stand-up establishment.
Legend has it that, to attract his first customers, Nathan hired vagrants to populate the stand, creating the impression that he had many clients. But when people sneered at the bums in their ragged dress, Nathan rented doctors’ uniforms and had the tramps wear them. “If doctors eat here, you can too,” he is supposed to have said to potential customers.
Soon Nathan’s became famous not only in New York but around the world. Al Capone, a Brooklyn native, was said to eat at Nathan’s whenever he returned to New York from Chicago, where he was the capo de tutti capi of the Italian Mafia. In 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt served Nathan’s hot dogs to the king and queen of England when they visited his home in New York State. In 1977, Barbra Streisand had the hot dogs shipped to London for a private party.
Each July 4, Nathan’s holds a contest, the winner of which is the person who can consume the greatest number of hot dogs within 12 minutes. At first these competitions were merely publicity stunts; in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s the winners ate between 10 and 20 hot dogs. However, in recent years, the Nathan’s contest has become a highly disputed stop on the circuit of what has become known as “competitive eating.” (The “sport” has an “international federation” and some of its events are broadcast on ESPN.)
Stakes have become hazardously higher. In 1997, Ed “The Animal” Krachie, who had devoured 22 hot dogs the previous year, was beaten by a 134-pound noodle-eating champion named Hirofumi Nakajima (who downed 24). During most of the subsequent years, the Japanese have dominated Nathan’s contests. In 2000, Kazutoyo Arai won (having consumed 25 1/8 hot dogs), but beginning in 2001, Takeru Kobayashi won for six straight years, eating between 49 and 53 ¾ dogs.
Apart from his accomplishments in hot-dog eating, Kobayashi, who is 29 and, at 165 pounds, comparatively robust for his countrymen, has also won contests for consuming 97 hamburgers in eight minutes, 5.5 kilos of lamb in 24 minutes, 41 lobster sandwiches in 10 minutes and 18 pounds of seared cow’s brains in 15 minutes (at an event called the Glutton Bowl).
Last summer, the Japanese was unseated by a 23-year-old engineering student from California named Joey Chestnut, who ate 66 hot dogs (the world record). Chestnut had also won championships for eating 47 grilled cheese sandwiches in 10 minutes, 182 chicken wings in 30 minutes and 6.3 pounds of deep-fried asparagus in 11 minutes. However, in the same contest that Kobayashi won for eating 97 hamburgers, Chestnut only mustered the wherewithal to put away 81.
Today Nathan’s offers hot dogs with various adornments, including chili, cheese and bacon. Their French fries are available with cheese, bacon or creamy garlic dressing. You can also get roast chicken with vegetables, fish and chips, soft-shell crabs and frog’s legs. Don’t. Any purist will tell you that the regular hot dog, dressed with sauerkraut or onions, and plain French fries with ketchup, is undoubtedly the classic Nathan’s meal.
Those willing to wander a few blocks from the amusement park will find Totonno’s on Neptune Avenue, where traditional Neapolitan thin-crust pizza, baked in a coal oven, has been served since 1924. Restaurant reviews hung on its walls use words such as “sacred,” “legend,” “heaven” and “best” to describe it. The Zagat Survey restaurant guide has opined that “only God makes better pizza,” although who exactly sampled the Almighty’s recipe, and where, are left unspecified.
That said, it is fair to warn that Totonno’s is commandeered by a surly dysfunctional family, whose members make customers wait outside on the sidewalk for a table, even in August, when temperatures in New York approach 40 degrees Celsius. You might have to send smoke signals to get a waitress’s attention, and if you finally flag her down, it is recommendable to order everything at once because she will be reluctant to return to the table. The only other detail that might spoil one’s appetite are photographs on the walls of both George Bushes, who have been among Totonno’s customers.
The boneyard
If the plans of Joseph Sitt, and the city, would necessarily result in an increase in Coney Island’s prices, it would not be the first time that a conflict between classes ensued in the territory. Histories of the area point out that when it first became a resort, in the mid-19th century, it was an enclave for the well-off. By the late 1870s, there was a racetrack, a 300-foot-tall observatory, and a hotel that boasted Oriental gardens, a bicycle track, a zoo and fireworks. However, by the early 1880s, it had also become a refuge for corrupt cops and politicians, prostitution and gambling, thus acquiring the nickname “Sodom by the sea.”
By the early 20th century, Coney Island had three amusement parks – Luna, Steeplechase and Dreamland – whose rides and attractions, for their day, were even more outrageous than Joseph Sitt’s current plans. Steeplechase, for example, was named for a metal racetrack around which mechanical horses, ridden by visitors, competed. This was utterly novel in 1903, as was the park’s airship tower, small railroad, and recreation of the city of Venice, including a network of canals. Luna Park, with 1,300,000 lightbulbs, was known as “the electric Eden,” and had a simulated moon landing more than fifty years before the Sputnik space launch. Dreamland had a mock city called Lilliputia, populated by 300 midgets, and an attraction called Fighting the Flames that simulated a fire in a New York tenement building.
Coney Island was wildly successful among its middle-class and well-to-do clientele. It wasn’t until the 1920s, when all of New York’s subway lines connected there, that it acquired a population with less discretionary income. It would not consolidate its reputation as “the poor man´s paradise” until the Depression of the 1930s.
Throughout its history various developers and politicians have tried to drastically change its image. After he became Parks Commissioner in 1937, Robert Moses reduced the amusement zone of the area to put up parks and playgrounds. In the 1950s, under a law called Title 1, he also appropriated entire streets of buildings and houses that belonged to private individuals, to build the area’s first housing projects.
Developer Fred Trump, Donald’s father, bought Steeplechase Park in 1966, with the intention of tearing it down and building apartment houses, despite the fact that they were not allowed according to New York’s zoning laws. When he failed to effect a change in those laws, as revenge, he demolished the park.
If the current battle over Coney Island is similar to those that have been fought in the past, what raises the stakes today is a real estate market in New York rising at alarming levels. The Sunday before the deadline to turn in this article, the real estate section of the New York Times featured a co-op loft in Tribeca for $1,485,000, a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side for $529,000, and a historic town house in Harlem at $2,900,000. Monthly rentals in Manhattan included a one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village for $3350 and another near Gramercy Park for $4250. Even in neighborhoods far from the center, in Brooklyn and Queens, sudios and one-bedroom condominiums cost between $300,000 and $600,000, and the minimum rentals for one-room studios were close to $2000.
With so much money at stake, a certain amount of greed is inevitable. It is unsurprising that a developer like Sitt would want to have zoning rules changed to get a piece of the action. However, New York developers, in the name of raising rents, have been cavalier about erasing much of what made the city uniquely idiosyncratic. I asked a few friends to recall some of the city’s hallmarks that had disappeared over the last 20 years, and the list is too long to reproduce here. But among the recent additions to New York’s boneyard are the strip of second-hand bookstores that used to line Fourth Avenue, as well as the majority of the Italian cafes of Greenwich Village. The Second Avenue Delicatessen, one of the last remaining restaurants of its type in Manhattan, closed its doors in 2005. The Bleecker Street Cinema, and almost every other theatre that showed art films in the city, has also been shuttered.
The Cedar Tavern, the bar where Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and the rest of the Abstract Expressionists argued drunkenly in the 1950s, disappeared recently. So did Folk City, where Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel had their first New York gigs. The Fillmore East, where Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix played in the 1960s, which was converted to the gay disco The Saint in the 1980s, is now a condominium apartment building. CBGB’s, New York’s bastion of punk rock, also disappeared last year. The Cookery, a bar that featured singers Alberta Hunter and Helen Humes in their waning years, is gone, as are other jazz venues like Bradley’s and Gregory’s. Chumley’s, which had been a speakeasy in the 1920s, also closed.
Most of New York’s characteristic bookstores are gone, long replaced by franchises of Barnes & Noble. So are the record stores, and the quirky little stationery stores, substituted by Staples, Office Depot and similar chains. Zito’s and Zampieri’s, the Italian bakeries, are vanished. Most of the department stores – Gimbel’s, Orbach’s, Klein’s, Altman’s, Bonwit Teller – have disappeared, because so many people buy their clothes at the Gap, Banana Republic and the same stores whose outlets exist the rest of the country.
Gay friends remember an entire vanished world: the Everard Baths, the Gaiety Burlesk, the leather bars the Anvil and the Mine Shaft, the pickup bars Uncle Charlie’s and the Ninth Circle, as well as a Chelsea café called the Big Cup. And of course the Times Square of legend – with its all-night movie theatres, pinball parlors, porno houses gay and straight, drugs and prostitutes – has been replaced by a veritable Disneyland, sanitized for the whole family, whose stores are mostly franchises, and could be anywhere in the world.
It is probably best not to be too sentimental or attached to any element of cities, which inevitably change. The relevant question is whether or not they are transforming in ways that are attractive to us, or if instead they are turning into cities like any other, that no longer inspire. There is no doubt that globalization has not favored New York, and has turned it into a city less like its historical self than ever, and more like the rest of the United States.
These are some the reflections caused by sitting inside the entrails of the Cyclone alongside Gerry Menditto, as the cars of the ride rattle and roll above our heads. He and the roller coaster are protected by New York’s landmark law. For now. And the rest of Coney Island? As Joseph Sitt promised, next summer “something” will be there.