Ah, Coney Island. A place of fun and amusement at the end of the tracks down in Brooklyn since the 1800s that has succumbed to urban blight in the last few decades. Now developers are out to tear it all down and start anew. While the "new" Coney Island would look clean and shiny, the history of the area would be wiped clean. There is another way of course, by combining old and new, keeping the nostalgia of famous peninsula alive. Instead there is a stalemate between the developers and the current owners.
From AM New York:
The Grasshorn building, built in the early 1880s, and the Henderson building, once the home of a popular Vaudeville theater, are expected to be razed as developer Thor Equities makes way for a glitzy $1.5 billion development that will include an amusement park, water theme park, hotels, time-share units and retail shops on 10 acres between West 10th and West 15th streets.
Dick Zigun, founder of the arts organization Coney Island USA, which runs Sideshows by the Seashore and the annual Mermaid Parade, said his group reached a preliminary agreement last year with Thor chief executive Joseph Sitt to purchase the Grasshorn building using $2 million in city-awarded grant money.
Zigun hoped to move the Coney Island Museum into the building that was best known as the home of Henry Grasshorn's hardware store, which provided amusement owners with the parts they needed to keep their rides running. But Sitt broke off talks with Coney Island USA last month, saying the building was no longer for sale and that he planned to build a new structure there, Zigun said.
"In a place where so little has survived, it would be a shame to lose that building," Coney Island historian Charles Denson said.
It would be a shame, it is a shame to see so much of New York being swallowed up by greedy developers that care more about their profit margins than the history of this great city.
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