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 Page 3 The facility includes a new building, tracks and platforms, foundations for the elevated station, state-of-the-art signaling, and a dramatic overhead canopy that will stretch across the open-air platforms. Despite the ambitious design, the project's biggest challenge was figuring out a way to do the work. "Originally the job was going to take eight years," says Mike Kyriacou, design manager on the project with the New York City Transit Authority. But he and his staff figured out a way to do it in 42 months, although it means shutting some lines down for years at a time. "We had to go to the community and say, 'We know you'll have to suffer for a while,'" Kyriacou says. The present station is a wreck of crumbling concrete and rusted metal--a sad testimony to the low priority given to maintenance of public infrastructure. "The condition of the existing facility is so dilapidated," he says. "It looks like a place that no one has ever touched." The most visually striking component of the station will be winglike glass-and-steel canopies equipped with solar panels capable of generating enough electricity to heat and cool the building. These will stretch across four platforms and be visible from a considerable distance. The solar system will produce the most electricity--150 kilowatts--on a hot summer day, precisely when air conditioners around the city are draining the power system of Con Ed. Below the canopy and platforms will be a three-story, 34,000-square-foot building that will replace the existing one-story station. This will include not only space for about 300 daily transit workers but also a new police precinct house. The landmark-worthy mosaic facade of the old station will be removed, cleaned, and rebuilt. Andrew Berger, an architect at di Domenico + Partners in New York who designed the new three-story building, says he believes the new station is "all part of a bigger strategy, which is that if you build it, they will come. It's a real opportunity to not only knit together an improved transit facility and police station, but hopefully leave a positive statement about future development opportunities out in Coney Island." The renovation of the Coney Island--Stillwell Avenue stop should spur development the same way a new highway creates more shopping malls and subdivisions. The renovation will not expand capacity--but appearances are important. In a few years visitors and residents of Coney Island will enter the new building, lined with stores inside and out, then walk or roll up gently sloping ramps to wait for a train under a futuristic glass canopy. In addition to the subway, there are other city-funded projects under construction. Mermaid Commons--developed by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development through a public-private partnership--is a series of in-fill buildings along 13 blocks of Mermaid Avenue. The project includes an entire block of three-story row houses, incorporating retail below and apartments above, each selling for $274,000. The plan is to sell these to middle-income families who will live on one fioor, run a retail store, and rent out one apartment to another family. Standing on the Coney Island boardwalk at sunset, you see an amazing parade of passersby: a Hasid in a black hat and long coat, a snake handler, a Hispanic woman with her ice-cream-smeared children, a white-haired man in a shirt and tie speaking Russian to his grown blue-jeaned son. In a park off to one side of the boardwalk, a group of Latino and black men play handball. Coney Island has always been a melting pot. The novelist Joseph Heller, in his memoir Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, wrote of the poor but thriving community of Jews, Italians, and other ethnic groups in the 1930s. With a new ballpark and a renovated subway station and beachfront, more people will come to Coney Island and blend into the soup. However, many people are skeptical that better days are ahead. Calling it "a cliché of seedy decay," David Barstow of the New York Times recently wrote of how "the old-timers and tourists and politicians cling like rust to the distant fantasy that Coney Island will be what it once was, as if the great cultural and demographic tides that built and then laid waste to the place were merely boardwalk phantasms." But Barstow failed to mention the renovated subway line. If the MTA added better express service to Manhattan, the island could be a half hour from Wall Street. And as an oceanfront amusement park, Coney Island is still not bad. Sitting in a rocking car on top of the Wonder Wheel, you can see the ballpark and the elevated subway line that glides between the housing towers nearby. From this vantage point, the train looks like another amusement-park ride--perhaps one to try after the roller coaster. I suspect that in coming years more people will try that ride, and visit Coney Island. Alex Marshall is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken. |
