Bluejake

On Saturday I took the F down to Coney Island. The ride takes about forty-five minutes from Broadway-Lafayette, which makes it a perfect way to kill some time. I spent the trip reading "Death and Life of Great American Cities". I'm at the part where Jane Jacobs is talking about the importance of cross-use, which is her way of saying that neighborhoods need to have people in them doing different things at different times. Workers, residents, local-visitors, tourists: a successful neighborhood brings them in on overlapping schedules, and their presence animates the neighborhood and allows life there to flourish. Coney Island is a perfect illustration of this idea. The neighborhood has always been a disaster because it has only a single use: summer-tourism. On the off-season, nothing is happening there, and apart from Nathan's, everything is closed-down and spooky. Coney Island has other problems too, of course-- the giant super-block projects on the north side of Surf Avenue don't help. But the main problem of the neighborhood is a lack of multiple primary uses-- and until that gets solved, Coney Island will always be half-dead.

Update: here's a timely interview from the Courier with Joseph Sitt, the president of Thor Equities-- that's the company redeveloping most of Coney Island. He says in part:

The mix is driven by several factors. One of the largest problems Coney Island has right now is it’s dead most of the year and it’s a scary neighborhood late at night almost all year long because of the lack of people present there.

In our plan, one of our goals is to include a residential and hotel component that will create that 24/7 activity 365 days a year so that there’ll be constant activity which is what creates the vitality for areas and developments like this cause you have people there, and in the case of the hotel, transient activity — people coming and going.

So, at least they understand the need for cross-use. Not that it's all good news: in the rest of the interview, he talks about building lots of luxury hotels and high-end retail. That stuff tends to bring in a lot of transient population, and as Jane Jacobs says: a neighborhood really only develops if a large portion of the people that use it come back every day.