New York Adult Entertainment: NYC council votes to turn Coney Island beachfront area into year …
The developer has refused to sell for years. And he says he still wants to play a role in the future of his childhood neighborhood.
“I’m the stakeholder. I’m the guy who controls this — it’s my sandbox,” the 45-year-old landowner said this month.
On another 20 acres just blocks from the beach, the city’s Coney Island Development Corp. foresees 4,500 new housing units and a park for area residents.
Ron Stewart, a 56-year-old parole officer who has lived in the neighborhood since he was a child, says there have always been two Coney Islands: “the amusement area and the residents.”
“People would laugh at me when I said I live in Coney Island,” he said. “They’d say, ‘You live under the Cyclone? You live in the spook house?’”
These days, the amusement area at night is home to prostitutes and drug addicts, residents say.