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 Page 2 The combination of highways, parks, and projects almost urban-renewed the old Coney Island out of existence. Luna Park, the second great amusement park, burned down in 1944. The first high-rise housing project went up on its site shortly thereafter. During the next three decades vast rows of tall housing projects were built. The city also ripped out many of the traditional streets of low-rise apartments and homes. Today Coney Island has a fading retail strip, remnants of an old-style urban neighborhood, and scores of high-rise apartments, most of them low-income housing. It is this jumbled mix that the various "improvements" will act upon.
Even without the nostalgia for pro baseball in Brooklyn, the appeal of the ballpark is easy to understand. It combines beach and baseball in a Zen-like, all-is-one experience. Sitting in the stands, you can see the blue ocean, white sand, boardwalk filled with strolling people, amusement rides, and baseball game with just a swivel of the head. Lead architect John Ingram, from Jack L. Gordon Architects in New York, said he did everything he could to bring the resort ambience into the stadium. Whereas most sports venues work to create a sense of enclosure, KeySpan Park (named after the utilities company that bought naming rights) does the opposite. The bland glass-fronted skyboxes were stacked in a pyramid behind home plate rather than strung out along left and right fields, which would have obscured views. The stadium has an entrance directly off the boardwalk: you can walk the hardwood planks, turn, and head directly to the stadium on a pathway made of identical wood without changing elevation. At night the ballpark has a different dynamic. The sun and sand disappear, and the stadium merges with the lights of Deno's Wonder Wheel Park. Surrounding it are giant lollipop lights, each 120 feet high, topped with 30-foot circular neon lights. These red, green, and blue lights mesh with multicolor lights placed under the skyboxes, creating a bowl of illumination. When a Cyclone hits a home run, the lollipops spin in circles, playing off the fiashing lights from the amusement park a block away. "We were trying to get some of the colorful overlays of light and graphics that were associated with the old Coney Island experience," Ingram says, adding that they rejected a historical look to the ballpark. "This is Coney Island now. We are its future. We are the fresh new look on the block." The stadium's 800-space parking lot is placed to the side of the building and is not visible from the stands. Although minimizing the parking lot visually is admirable, the larger question is, why is the city spending money on parking while also dropping a quarter-billion dollars to rebuild a subway station a block away that can handle a million people per day? No doubt the owner of the Cyclones wanted parking, but it may not be in the long-term interest of Coney Island. In 1997 Bilbao, Spain, opened its new Guggenheim museum. Designed by Frank Gehry, its dramatic presence seemed to single-handedly revive that fading Basque industrial city. But the $100 million museum was the capstone of a $1.5 billion urban redevelopment program, which included a new subway line, refurbished train and streetcar system, waterfront development plan, and new airport. The shiny Guggenheim was simply the bauble on top of a mound of infrastructure, which would do more in the long run to bring additional jobs and residents to the city. In similar fashion, the Coney Island ballpark is the bauble on top of some serious infrastructure. Although the ballpark got its picture in the New Yorker, the new subway facility is more important. Four separate lines--the B, D, F, and N--terminate here, giving it immense capacity. Like Grand Central Station, the stop was built with ramps instead of stairs, to better handle the vast crowds. As you stand in the station's swelling mouth, where four ramps from four platforms from eight tracks exit, you can visualize the crowds of past days moving down ramps resembling cattle chutes. |
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