Sure, The Plush Toys Are Trite, But They’re The Only Plush Toys We’ve Got

The cleverly contrarian Observer wonders whether all of Coney Island is really worth saving:

Several iconic Coney Island attractions — including the rickety, whiplash-inducing Cyclone rollercoaster and scenic 150-plus-foot-tall Wonder Wheel — are already city-protected landmarks that [developer Joe] Sitt can’t touch. Same goes for the long-defunct Parachute Jump structure, commonly referred to as Brooklyn’s Eiffel Tower, and the original Nathan’s hot-dog stand, built in 1916.

And the nonprofit group Coney Island USA, which operates the freaky circus-themed Sideshow by the Seashore, is in contract to buy its own 12,000-square-foot building along of Surf Avenue for more than $3 million.

The contested turf, therefore, mostly boils down to a dense, three-block-long stretch of video arcades, bumper cars, kooky haunted houses, various food and beverage vendors, and trite plush-toy prize contests.

Does the public really care if that stuff gets bulldozed?

Well when you put it that way . . .

Location Scout: Coney Island Amusement Core.

Mayor Pimps Congestion Pricing At Memorial Day Parade; Flack Jacket Fits!

Apparently Hizzoner really isn’t running for president:

U.S. troops will be fighting in vain if New Yorkers aren’t healthy enough to enjoy the freedoms they are defending, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday — making a tenuous Memorial Day link between the war and his congestion pricing plan.

After marching in the Laurelton Memorial Day Parade, Bloomberg made a push for his plan, calling it a “win, win, win, for everybody.”

“Our soldiers are fighting so that we have our freedoms. Unless you have good health, you’re not going to be around to enjoy them,” Bloomberg said.

“The pollution that’s going into the air today is causing our kids in a lot of neighborhoods in New York City to have four times the national asthma rate.”

The mayor enlisted a group of environmental activists to buttress his case and emphasized that the city’s air is simply not good enough.

“It is not healthy for you; it’s not healthy for our children yet to be born, or our children who are here today.

“We have to do something to reduce the pollution in the air and the only solution really is mass transit and the only place money is going to come for mass transit is from something like congestion pricing,” Bloomberg said.

Governors Island As Wedge Issue

Some bold plans to remake Governors Island refuse to shy away from the important debates — stem cells and Al Gore, for example:

The Philadelphia firm WRT, teamed with Urban Strategies, from Toronto, mixed its inspirational metaphors. “We were looking at forms in nature like oysters and pearls and stem cells,” says WRT partner Margie Ruddick. “Things that have a forgiving architecture, and where one thing is nested in another.”

Her team’s plan carves a series of interlocking ovals into the flat southern landscape, nesting a play lawn inside a larger great meadow, and an artificial hill inside a new wetland at the southern end. Rather than building up the center, the WRT scheme builds up the edge, stringing a series of structures that could house a spa and retreat center on a rocky promontory, plus a working waterfront along the Brooklyn side. These buildings, however, would not pop up out of the landscape but be part of it: Green roofs would slope up from the interior toward the water at one or two stories, turning the center of the island into a protected bowl.

“I have been reading Last Child in the Woods,” Ruddick says. “It is about how those of us who connected very closely to nature as children have a sense of responsibility for it. I thought at one point of calling it Gore Island.” To this end, the team envisions a camp in a new forested ravine and a sustainable farm and garden. The southwest side of the island has evolved into a sandbar beach and reef. The plan has a hotel on the west side (perhaps one of the new Starwood eco-hotels), but not for the business traveler: “It should be considered a retreat.”

Location Scout: Governors Island.

Whither The Tremendous Egos?

Ridiculously outsized notion gets Calatrava-ed:

The proposed penthouse at the top of the Woolworth Building was to be one of the most coveted living spaces in New York. With five floors, 7,500 square feet, a private cylindrical glass elevator, and a terrace with sweeping views of nearly the entire city, the apartment would provide, as Corcoran Group CEO Pam Liebman put it, “tremendous ego gratification,” and cap off the conversion of the 1913 building’s slender Gothic tower into apartments. In 2000, the Witkoff Group, which owns the building, said it would add a screening room, wine cellar, cigar lounge, and spa under the building in hopes of luring residents east of the heart of Tribeca. But now nobody will; after gutting the tower, Witkoff is shifting gears. In another sign that the office market is hotter than the condo market, the Woolworth tower is being converted back to commercial space.

Not sure it’s a true sign that the condo market has cooled, but you’ve got to appreciate the symbolism.

Location Scout: Woolworth Building.

Why Bus Rapid Transit Will Never Work

For the MTA, words like “buff” and “enthusiast” are euphemisms for “putting the fox in charge of the henhouse”:

[Jason] Brown had just gotten the subway fan’s equivalent of a Broadway callback. A year and a half earlier, he had taken the examination to be a conductor, and now he was being called in for a medical exam and an interview.

Had Mr. Brown scored lower, he might have waited even longer. The current list of conductor candidates, which is based on the 2004 exam, had 21,749 names on it in 2005. If previous lists are any guide, only about a third of those names will have been called by the time the list expires in 2009.

This wait is frustrating enough for ordinary applicants. But it is agonizing for subway buffs, the people who linger in stations waiting for a rare new-model test car to pass, stay up for 24 hours trying to travel every inch of the city’s tracks, or speculate online about how conductors relieve themselves in an emergency.

Some passengers may not want a starry-eyed hobbyist at the wheel of their train, but for a transit buff the chance to drive a subway car is a dream come true, a dizzying intersection of the workaday world and the realm of fantasy.

“When I was a kid, I’d always had a crazy little dream to drive a subway train,” said Vincent Sbano, 48, a retired tax lawyer from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, who took the exam in 2003 and started as a trainee train operator on April 30.

. . .

Mr. Sbano does not consider himself a through-and-through subway buff, but he confirmed a piece of advice widely dispensed to job candidates on Rider Diaries: When applying for a job with the M.T.A., keep your subway enthusiasms to yourself.

The transportation authority denies that it discriminates against train fans, but on Rider Diaries the idea is alive and well. As a fellow transit fan wrote to Mr. Brown: “Don’t even hint you are a buff.”