Behold! The new and improved Coney Island of the future, maybe. As we've said before, shopping mall developer Thor Equities has been buying up land along the Boardwalk like it's going out of style (which it did, about 30 years ago), to much speculation as to what they're up to and how it will fit in with the city's own redevelopment plans. New York magazine went to the source?Thor boss Joe Sitt?for the answer, and woo boy is it a doozy:
He plans to build a glittering resort paradise right next to the Coney Island boardwalk—a retail and entertainment colossus every bit as outrageous and flamboyant as the Bahamas’ Atlantis. The plan includes megaplexes. An indoor water park. A 500-room, four-star hotel—four stars, in Coney Island!—and, at the center of it all, an enormous, psychedelic carousel laced with visual cues to a Coney Island that Timothy Leary could have dreamed up. Equally spectacular, Sitt hopes, will be a blimp that will take off from the complex’s roof, carrying tourists on joyrides over the city as it flashes the resort’s name in giant technicolor letters: THE BOARDWALK AT CONEY ISLAND. “The dirigible will leave every ten minutes,” Sitt says, jabbing his finger excitedly toward the sky. “On an ongoing basis. Another. Another. Another. Lifting off and taking people on a tour, spreading the message that this is the place to be.”Because who doesn't take their social cues from a terrifying fleet of giant blimps hovering above the city? But it all makes sense, doesn't it? They steal from us, we steal from them, and the Earth?improbably?keeps rotating on its axis.
· The Incredibly Bold, Audaciously Cheesy, Jaw-Droppingly Vegasified, Billion-Dollar Glam-Rock Makeover of Coney Island [NY Mag]
· Coney Island Prepares for Its Face Lift [Curbed]