The city’s failure to redevelop, reimagine and reinvigorate Coney Island is a decades-long calamity. Dating back to the Wagner administration at least, (and with the lone exception of Rudy Giuliani, who built a minor league baseball stadium there), mayor after mayor has sat idly while this once-vibrant, world-famous amusement area has decayed for wont of investment, development and wild, crazy ideas befitting the spirit of the so-called “People’s Playground.”
Given all those years of failure, we remain completely baffled — and, frankly, appalled — by the Bloomberg Administration’s handling of a legitimate proposal by Joe Sitt’s Thor Equities to redevelop a vast stretch of Coney Island’s amusement area into a $1.5-billion year-round theme park, recreation, hotel, restaurant and retail Xanadu.
For the past year or so, Thor has spent more than $100 million buying up land — including the Astroland amusement park and most of Deno’s Wonder Wheel Park — at market rates. At this point, Sitt owns most of the land between the landmark Cyclone roller coaster and Nathan’s Famous.
But to realize his dream of adding hotel units to Coney’s amusement distict, he needs the city to grant him a zoning variance.
For some reason, the city is playing hardball.
At first, city officials said they objected to Sitt’s plan to build luxury condo units inside Coney’s amusement zone. So Sitt jettisoned those units in favor of three hotels, one of them a time-share.
Still, the city has objected. That’s fine. We certainly welcome a healthy dose of skepticism where developers are concerned, especially one with Sitt’s track record of winning zoning changes and then re-selling his newly valuable land at a large markup.
But what is particularly galling is the way that “city officials” have demonstrated — or, more accurately, not demonstrated — their objections to Sitt’s plan.
Taking advantage of a local media obsessed with “scoops,” these “city officials” have been doling out little “exclusives” to both the Daily News and the Post on an almost daily basis.
Last week, the “scoops” kept coming, yet none explained why the city does not like Joe Sitt:
• First, the Post reported that city planners had taken a taxpayer-financed junket to Denmark to meet with operators of Copenhagen’s famed Tivoli Gardens amusement park. Those same planners have also been to Disney World for further “fact-finding.”
The purpose of this leak was to remind Sitt that the city could always condemn his land in Coney Island via eminent domain and turn it over to a developer of its choosing. Threatening a landowner with losing his property if he doesn’t play ball is a horrendous misuse of civic power.
• Next, a “high-ranking” city official — unnamed, of course — told the Daily News that the Sitt plan was “dead in the water.” The official said that Thor must come up with a better plan before the city will even meet with the developer. He or she called Sitt’s plan “atrocious,” but never explained what its main atrocities are.
Nowhere, it seems, is anyone willing to remind the mayor of one important benefit of Sitt’s plan: it is a plan! For the first time in decades, there is an actual plan on the table. But rather than debate it on the merits, “city officials” are going on paid junkets and negotiating through hand-picked stooges in the media. (And, all the while, negotiating with Sitt behind closed doors, the papers have reported.)
The irony, of course, is that the city already has a perfectly good way of hashing out the merits or exposing the demerits of a given development proposal: the existing seven-month Uniform Land-Use Review Procedure. Sure, it’s a jargon-filled mouthful, but ULURP (as the insiders call it), is required whenever a developer seeks a zoning change (Atlantic Yards did not go through ULURP because the state’s development agency superceded local oversight, an egregious power grab the unfortunate consequences of which the city will be living with for decades).
Under ULURP, a wide variety of local officials — from community board members, to the borough president, to planning commissioners, to Councilmembers to the mayor himself — get to weigh in, negotiate, demand concessions and, if still unsatisfied, vote “no.”
So here’s our suggestion to the Bloomberg Administration:
Let Joe Sitt apply for his zoning change, force him to make concessions so that he can get through the land-use review process with the necessary approvals, and stop all this back-room, leak-driven nonsense.
