Amusing the Zillion

Moments in Time: Artist Eric March’s Coney Island

October 12, 2009 by Tricia

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Astroland Park, Watercolor by Eric March. From the exhibition “Moments in Time: Queens to Coney Island” at Park Slope Gallery, October 16 – December 31.

The roof of Gregory & Paul’s, now known as Paul’s Daughter, looked empty this summer without the iconic Astroland Rocket. I kept having to remind myself: The Rocket is safe in storage in Staten Island. It’s been saved! But things were not the same in so many ways: Astroland was gone. Closed on September 7, 2008. In Eric March‘s achingly lovely watercolor study from the summer of 2008, G & P’s original sign is intact, the “Astroland Park” Rocket is perched atop the Boardwalk food stand, and all is well in this part of the world.

The artist, whom ATZ got acquainted with in Coney, recently sent us a link to a preview of his upcoming exhibition “Moments in Time: Queens to Coney Island.” The oil paintings and charcoal drawings of Queens industrial landscape are impressive. Naturally we felt drawn to successive images of the Rocket– the black & white and hand-tinted etchings done in 2009. “For ‘Astroland’ I thought the fine detail you can achieve in etching lent itself well to depicting all the signage,” says Eric March. “‘Parachute Jump’ has a lot of precise line work but I also used different biting techniques to get a softer sense of atmosphere in the sky. In addition, an additional layer of yellow ink rolled over the entire plate helps gives ‘Parachute Jump’ that sunset glow.”

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Astroland, etching by Eric March, 2009

Whenever I ran into Eric in Coney Island he was busy gathering signatures for a petition to save the amusement zoning and move the proposed high rises north of Surf Avenue. How did all the Save Coney lobbying and events of the summer affect or inspire his work?

The show is actually about half Coney Island subjects and half Long Island City subjects. I moved to LIC in 2006 from Brooklyn and was attracted to all the industrial structures in Queens Plaza and other places in LIC. Coney Island has my heart, though, and I was drawn back to the beach when I started developing the work for this show. In 2006 I had my first solo show, “A Brooklyn Year”, which was all Brooklyn—including a lot of Coney Island pieces. So I already had ideas for paintings that I didn’t get to for my last show.

When I learned that Coney Island was potentially destined for the wrecking ball it definitely lit a fire under me to not only capture images of the Coney that I knew and loved, but also to get involved politically to help keep it that way. That’s when I started volunteering for Save Coney Island. I did some petitioning on the boardwalk and helped organize to raise awareness about the city’s redevelopment plan and it’s inherent threat to the existence of the vibrant, small scale, historic, and unique Coney Island that’s been drawing people there for over 100 years. The fight’s not over yet and I hope that when people see the work in this show they will also be inspired to fight for a Coney Island that remains one of the last places in New York City that is an open-access melting pot of people, creativity, color, and fun.

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Astroland, hand-tinted etching by Eric March, 2009

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Gallery Talk, Friday, November 6, 7 pm
The artist will discuss the artistic process and the political inspiration for his Coney Island images. Featuring guest speaker Juan Rivero from Save Coney Island

Moments in Time: Queens to Coney Island, October 16- December 31, 2009. Park Slope Gallery is a by-appointment-only art gallery in the historic Park Slope section of Brooklyn. Phone 718-768-4883 or e-mail parkslopegallery@mindspring.com

Parachute Jump, etching by Eric March, 2009

Posted in art | Tagged art, Astroland Rocket, Brooklyn, Coney Island, Eric March, etching, Park Slope Gallery, Save Coney Island | 1 Comment »

Traveler: Carnival Rides as Public Art at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche

October 10, 2009 by Tricia

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Wild Ride 2009 by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan. Performance Art/Multimedia Installation on Bay Street, Toronto at Nuit Blanche, October 3, 2009. Rides owned by Funland Outdoor Amusements. Photos courtesy of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche

Now that the summer is over in Coney, we have time to make good on our promise to cover not only Coney Island and the amusement business, but “fun places in between.” The category “Traveler” will include places we’ve been, places we’d like to go, and places that have something we’d love to see recreated in Coney Island. We’re kicking it off with free carnival rides!

Tag surfing for “amusement rides” on WordPress, photos of a Fun Slide and Avalanche ride set up in Toronto’s financial district for an all-night art fest caught our eye. Last weekend, the 4th annual Nuit Blanche (aka “Sleepless Night”) attracted an estimated one million festival-goers and featured over 150 contemporary art installations. On the Nuit Blanche website, we found this writeup by artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan about their “Wild Ride 2009″:

Bay Street – emblem of Canada’s banking industry – is closed. The smell of cotton candy and raucous music fill the air. Two midway rides reflect the whirling, tilting exhilaration of the bull market and its less than thrilling collapse. Free to the public and staffed by recently downsized businesspeople, the rides invite audience members to kinetically contemplate the ups and downs of the recent economic crisis. Out of the darkened financial district, screams will be heard!

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ATZ enjoys seeing carnival rides transform the city streets at Little Italy’s San Gennaro and other Italian Feasts into a temporary People’s Playground. We’re taken with the democratic idea of rented carnival rides presented as a free public art project. Did we mention “Wild Ride 2009” and the other interactive artwork was free to the public thanks to $2 million in funding from the City of Toronto, the Province of Ontario, and Scotiabank? We could use a few free rides in the newly rezoned Coney Island. Note to Creative Time, the non-profit which commissioned the Dreamland Artists Club sign painting project in 2005 and Steve Powers’ Guantanamo-themed “The Waterboard Thrill Ride” (not an amusement ride) in 2008. Here’s your next Coney project: Commission an artist to bring back the Whip and Zipper rides and spin a narrative around it.

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“Wild Ride 2009” creators Dempsey and Millan have collaborated on performances, film and public art projects since 1989, but for this project they teamed up with showmen from Ontario’s Funland Shows. How did it go? We did a quick Q & A with the artists via email to find out…

Q: How did you get the idea do this?

A: We received the commission in the fall of 2008. It was to do a 12-hour art piece on Bay Street in the business district of Toronto. In Canada, Bay Street is synonymous with the economy. It is the financial engine of the country. A couple of things struck us about the site. The area is a series of glass canyons: banking skyscrapers everywhere. Loads of reflective surfaces. There also aren’t any people on the street. There is an underground system called the PATH that is really a vast underground mall. It sucks all the life from pedestrian street traffic. The economic collapse had just happened so the lack of people on the street seemed more eerie. The financial centre of Canada seemed dead.

Q: Are you fans of carnivals and fairs?

A: We grew up going to the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. It was the thing that you looked forward to every year, almost like Christmas. Midway carnivals meant freedom, abandon, risk, and possibility. There was also that “post” feeling afterwards when you realized you had spent all your money and had nothing to show for it. We though it might be a good metaphor for the financial meltdown. A wild ride. We could comment on the folly/absurdity of the speculative financial industry.

Plus we wanted to return Bay Street to the people – us – who paid for it. Make it useable, functional, joyful. Make it ours. What would be more democratic than free midway rides and cotton candy?

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Q: Can you tell me about carnival company from whom you rented the rides? What was it like working with them?

A: We rented two rides from Funland/Superior . They are a partnership with a long history in the Ontario midway business. They staffed the rides with their carnies who we dressed in business suits. Beforehand we told the public that the midway was being run by downsized business people but on the night we confessed that, really, those Bay Street types have few transferable skills, and that in the interest of safety we had hired skilled professionals and dressed them in business attire, as appropriate to the district.

We were afraid that the carnies would be resistant to wearing the suits but they were so into the spirit of the event. They looked super sharp, literally like they had just stepped off the trading floor of the stock market. And they kept the energy up all night, playing with the crowd, shaking their hands…very business-y! We were awed by their ability and enthusiasm. It made us think about how we valourize and reward some kinds of labour (like that of bankers and stock traders) but not others (like carnies). The guys working for us were just as capable, smart and charismatic.

We were also struck by how removing a ride from a carnival and putting it in another context transformed it into a beautiful object. It was as if people were seeing the rides for the first time. They looked so beautiful (and so incongruous) on Bay Street. People were awed by the blinking lights reflected in the banking towers.

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Also, because everything was free, sometimes the carnies would let a ride go on for 20 minutes if the riders were willing. There was lots of teasing back and forth. It felt like there was plenty, that you could have all you wanted. Now that’s a rare feeling, especially on Bay Street!

We transformed the location in a couple of other ways, too. We made signs (“Wild Ride…Do You Want to Go Lower?”and “Absolutely Free and Worth Less All The Time”), and pumped out a soundtrack featuring songs about money and loss with a voice-over by a barker (“Lay your money down”). The free cotton candy (distributed by volunteers in business suits) had clown-headed garbage cans nearby. People danced to the music, some putting the clown heads on, some playing air guitar. We rocked them all night long. Even at 6 am there were still lineups and big smiles. It was a beautiful night, the way fairs and carnivals can be, outside of time and sense: magical.

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A Rare Peek Inside Endangered Old Bank of Coney Island

October 9, 2009 by Tricia

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ATZ’s inside look at a rarely photographed Coney Island building begins at the entrance to the long vacant bank on West 12th Street across from Coney Island USA. The public hasn’t had access to the Bank of Coney Island building since the 1990s, when sideshow operator Bobby Reynolds moved into the defunct bank with his museum of curiosities.

Today the 1923 Classical Revival style Bank of Coney Island could be draped in black bunting and a rephrasing of Dante’s “Abandon hope all ye who enter….” Abandon hope of this historic building surviving in the upzoned Coney Island. The Bank of Coney has been sentenced to the circle of hell reserved for buildings considered unlikely to win landmark designation from the powers that be. Is it destined for demolition? Probably. The City of New York has rezoned the lot to accommodate one of the four high rise “hotels” placed on the south side of Surf Avenue by city planners. The Coney Island Rezoning Plan was passed by the City Council in July.

In recent years, the building has been among the historic structures kept empty and shuttered by Coney Island’s largest property owner Thor Equities.

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These photos were taken last year by a potential tenant who was interested in leasing and rehabbing the bank building to open a business for the 2009 season. Alas, Joe Sitt’s price to lease the property– $500,000– was too steep. Same story on the west side of Jones Walk, which remained shuttered and devoid of activity all summer. One tenant from last season was told the rent for his stand on the Walk had tripled from $8,000 to $24,000. ATZ was given these photos of the bank building months ago, but we made the decision not to post them until the season was over. Photos of vacant buildings and shuttered stores are bad for business because they tend to reinforce the public misperception that all of Coney Island is closed. Coney Island is open and not only that, it’s open year round!

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Delving into the history of the Bank of Coney Island, we found this description of the building in the city’s resource list: “The limestone-clad 3-story building has a double-height arched entrance flanked by pilasters, two double-height arched windows with keystones, a projecting cornice, and an attic story. The north façade is a nondescript party wall where there used to be an adjoining building. On the West 12th Street façade, the arched entrance and windows have been boarded up, as have the attic windows, and the façade details appear to have been removed from the southwest corner.”

William J. Ward (1867-1937), the founder of the Bank of Coney Island and its president for two decades, was inducted into the Coney Island Hall of Fame in 2008. “The Wards were early Coney pioneers, and the family, which still owns Jones Walk, is the last of the original landowners from the 1870s,” said Charles Denson of the Coney Island History Project at the Hall of Fame ceremony in August 2008. “William Ward was the proprietor of the block-long Ward’s Baths and Ward’s carousel, roller coaster, and kiddie park.” Ward was also the developer of the Half Moon Hotel and president of the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce.

The Ward family has since closed on the sale of their Coney Island property to the City. As for the Thor-owned Bank of Coney Island building, the Coney Island Rumor Mill is sayin’ Joe Sitt will sell all of his Coney property except Stillwell to the city after the election. If Mayor Mike gets re-elected. No matter who ends up owning the Bank of Coney, the best chance for its survival is the Municipal Art Society‘s recommendation that the city decrease the incentive to develop low rise buildings on lots where the FAR (floor to area ratio) has been increased. As MAS’s Lisa Kersavage testified at the City Planning Commission hearing in May: “The City should consider a follow up corrective action that would create a designated area eligible for the transfer of development rights from landmarks, comparable to the Grand Central Subdistrict. This catchment area (or subdistrict) should be a place appropriate for higher density development north of Surf Avenue.”

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“The Bank of Coney Island building ceased being a bank circa 1990 and Bobby Reynolds moved there in 1992,” recalls Dick Zigun, whose Sideshows by the Seashore moved to West 12th Street from the Boardwalk in 1996. That summer the tabloids had fun writing about duelling sideshows on opposite sides of the street. After Reynolds and his two headed babies went back to California, the building fell vacant and was plundered. “The owner, Mike Weiss, had a salvage company come in and rip out each and every door and each and every fixture,” says Zigun. “The vandals broke in and stole the copper wiring and plumbing. The salvage company built a big pile of garbage in a corner and eventually it caught fire. There is smoke damage, water damage, etc. but the building is structurally sound.”

Coney Island USA received a grant from the JM Kaplan Fund in 2004 to “protect the legacy of old Coney Island.” Says Zigun: “Our grant from the Kaplan Fund to hire an architectural historian and do proper nominations for landmarks was only enough money to pay for five buildings and we stretched it to six. The six nominations was an arbitrary list based on finances not architectural merit. The bank was #7 on our list so it was not nominated which does not mean it is not worth saving. It would be a natural for a nightclub or music or theatre venue.”

The Municipal Art Society had the bank building on their list of seven to save in Coney Island when MAS testified at City Planning in May 2009. Among the other structures identified by CIUSA, MAS and Save Coney Island are Nathan’s Famous, Henderson’s Music Hall, Shore Hotel, Childs Restaurant (CIUSA Building), the Grashorn Building, and the Shore Theater. “Under the NYC Landmarks Law, structures can be designated as landmarks for architectural, historical and cultural reasons,” said MAS’s Lisa Kersavage. “Although some of these structures have been altered over the years, their ties to the legendary Coney Island of the past gives them a cultural significance that should be recognized and protected.”

According to Zigun, discussions with Landmarks suggests that they probably will landmark the Coney Island USA building and the Shore Theater. “They are still discussing Nathan’s so there is still room for hope,” he says.

UPDATE August 14, 2010:

We’re sorry to report the demolition permit for the bank building was issued yesterday– Friday the 13th. It was no surprise because on Wednesday the sidewalks around the Thor-owned building were being dug up to disconnect sewer and water lines in preparation. How inexpressibly sad to see the potential here and what will be gone forever in a matter of days. Don’t bother calling the DOB to complain either. It’s final! According to the permit: “This job is not subject to the Department’s Development Challenge Process. For any issues, please contact the relevant borough office.” Yeah we have an issue. A piece of Coney Island’s history is being sacrificed to the mighty Thor. Joe Sitt will soon have another empty lot to add to his collection of empty lots.

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