Now It Begins

The New York Press may have jumped the gun back in 2005 by saying that “by summer 2006 much of Coney Island will be gone, and gone forever”, but it looks like that prognosis finally will come to pass:

Close the Zipper and shoo the Spider.

Those amusement rides — along with go-carts, batting cages and carny games — have been ordered out of a Coney Island site as redevelopment begins.

“Everybody’s heartbroken,” said Eddie Miranda, who has owned the W. 12th St. rides, including the Zipper and the Spider, for eight years. “We were all hoping for one more season.”

Eight renters received notice last week from their properties’ new owner, developer Thor Equities, telling them to be out when their leases expire Dec. 31.

Six tenants are in the Henderson Building on Stillwell Ave., a turn-of-the century structure that once housed a dance hall and hotel. The other two are are along W. 12th St. and Stillwell Ave. Combined, they operate more than a dozen businesses.

. . .

The redevelopment plan calls for a new promenade on Stillwell Ave. along with residential, entertainment and amusement components, Thor Equities spokesman Lee Silberstein said.

“The effort to transform Coney Island and recapture its past glory involves the demolition of a number of existing structures,” Silberstein said. “Therefore, to allow the new development to proceed in a timely manner, occupancy agreements with some of the tenants are not being renewed.”

Then again, it could just be a matter of perspective:

Some beloved Coney Island boardwalk mainstays — facing the bulldozer because of a proposed $1.5 billion renovation project — are getting a reprieve, The Post has learned.

Thor Equities — which purchased 10 acres of waterfront land hoping to create a glitzy amusement complex — said yesterday that 11 boardwalk businesses would be allowed to remain open at least one more summer.

Thor spokesman Lee Silberstein said the attractions — including Ruby’s Bar and Grill, Cha-Cha’s and Shoot the Freak paintball — will be given the opportunity to move into the proposed complex.

Location Scout: Coney Island.

I’d Use The Words “Meta” And “Ironic” If I Could Only Remember What They Meant

And we’d watch but the infinity mirror started to hurt our head too much:

The Burg is a single-camera scripted series filmed mostly inside this apartment and on a few street corners around the block. The episodes, ranging from one to 15 minutes in length, can be viewed at www.theburg.tv or downloaded through iTunes. Or observed in real time at any number of stops along the L train.

“The thing about Williamsburg,” said Kelli Giddish, a blond aspiring actress who plays a blond aspiring actress on the show, “is all the ugly people are trying to look pretty and all the pretty people are trying to look ugly.” She paused to let the observation sink in, then pulled a faded white satin nightshirt over her starlet-thin frame, belted it up tight with an oversized tan suede sash, topped it off with a white crocheted shawl and pronounced the new look “Granny Chic.” Several of her co-stars applauded.

The Burg is about the precious scenesters of Metropolitan Avenue and the silly things they do to be cool. Ms. Giddish has another soap job, on actual television, playing a onetime stripper named Di Kirby on ABC’s All My Children. On the Web, she plays Courtney, a sporadically anti-capitalist ditz.

Courtney’s friends in the Burg are more of the same: Spring, played by Lindsey Broad, is a youthful brunette who cares about the environment and wants to break her generation’s credit cycle. Jed, played by Bob McClure, wears thick black plastic glasses and forcibly prevents his friends from drinking anything other than Pabst. Xander, played by Matt Yeager, is a starving artist with a huge inheritance.

In place of holding steady jobs or contributing to the local economy, Spring, Xander and the gang spend their days coordinating their American Apparel leggings and their thrift-store cowboy boots with 18 plastic bracelets and two vinyl headbands from junior high. Their days are occupied with chemical boycotts, bike trips to Astoria, auditions for independent films and hours spent cursing gentrification and analyzing the complicated etiquette of modern bohemia.

It’s like Rent, only instead of AIDS, some of them have trust funds.

Hell House, New York City Style

This year features borough-specific haunted houses:

Last Halloween, [Timothy] Haskell, a theatre director, staged a public haunted house on the Lower East Side, and so many people showed up that hundreds never made it inside. “We realized that we had to turn away a lot of local people,” Haskell said. So this year he put up haunted houses in all five boroughs, tailored to prey on the fears peculiar to each one.

For months, Haskell and his crew polled residents of the five boroughs to find out their worst nightmares. . . . People from the Bronx and Queens, they said, tend to fear things that might actually happen, like being mugged (harpaxophobia), while Manhattanites are frightened of fantastical and unlikely occurrences (flying sharks, riding in an elevator that rockets through the roof of a building). “In Manhattan and Brooklyn, we heard ‘fear of the homeless,'” [chief designer Paul] Smithyman said. “Then, in the Bronx, we heard ‘fear of becoming homeless.'” Staten Island residents apparently dread chemical spills and gas leaks.

. . .

The challenge of creating a tableau representing acrophobia, the fear of heights (and the seventh most common fear of Manhattan residents), almost stumped the designers. “One idea was that we’d have people walk up a staircase and onto a Plexiglas floor and see teeny-tiny furniture beneath them,” Haskell said. “But there were liability issues.” Instead, they paired a video of someone falling off a ledge with an evocative sound effect: vroooooom, splat. For illyngophobia (fear of dizziness, No. 11 among Manhattanites), the team installed a giant spinning tunnel; for entomophobia (insects, No. 3), they glued a thousand dead cockroaches onto a wall; and for musophobia (mice, No. 6), they ordered an essence of dead rat from an outfit in Chicago called Sinister Scents.

That Doctor’s Yacht Is Brought To You By . . . Your Knees

The New York Marathon is making local doctors rich:

The marathon is 11 days away, but city doctors specializing in sports medicine are already seeing a run on appointments. Physicians say strenuous pre-marathon regimens, such as 20-mile training runs, can take a toll on the body.

Knee pain is the most common complaint of long-distance runners, the marathon’s medical director, Lewis Maharam, said. Dr. Maharam, who has a sports medicine practice on West 57th Street, estimates that his business increases by an average of 35% in the two weeks before and one week after the annual 26.2-mile race.

This year’s ING New York City Marathon, sponsored by New York Road Runners, is slated for Sunday, November 5.

On the day after the race, Dr. Maharam schedules no appointments. “People come in, and they get a number,” he said. “It’s like a bakery line, stretching down the hall.”

The director of sports medicine at New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia, William Levine, said the marathon is “not very good for your body.”

. . .

Tendonitis and cartilage tears resulting in knee pain are common marathon-related injuries, according to Dr. Levine. “There are patients who don’t really recover, and end up with chronic orthopedic problems,” he said. Earlier this week, Dr. Levine said he treated a patient who ran last year’s marathon and has been experiencing knee pain ever since.

Also seen are more serious problems, such as stress fractures in the hip, thigh, and calf bones, Dr. Levine said. He recalled operating on a marathon entrant who fractured a thighbone in the middle of the race several years ago.

Any Slower And We’d Be In A Permanent State Of Carnaval

Last year’s slowest bus was the M34 (3.4 mph). This year we see some improvement, as the M14A checks in at a 3.9 mph clip:

The crosstown bus moves — if you can call it that — across Manhattan’s 14th St. at an average speed of 3.9 mph, earning it bottom honors in the annual Pokey Awards, handed out to the slowest coach in town.

Dishonorable mentions also were handed out yesterday to New York’s most unreliable and off-schedule routes by the Straphangers Campaign and other public transportation advocates.

“There are 2.5 million New Yorkers who ride the buses each day, and they deserve better,” said Paul White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives.

The ceremony took place in Union Square, just feet from where the M14A crawls by, and featured advocates dressed in tuxedos and handing out Golden Snail awards after each drumroll.

Cue elderly and/or infirm:

“They go slow because of the traffic,” said Phyllis Casper, 79, a retired bookkeeper from Manhattan. “I could walk faster if my feet didn’t hurt.”

The subways are not an option because Casper has difficulty with the stairs.

“I hate to say I’m an old lady, but I am,” she said.

The best double-barreled middle finger of the day comes from the Transit Authority:

The Transit Authority agreed traffic is a problem, but in a statement tried to put the ultimate positive spin on the daily bus commute trauma: “Slow and unreliable bus service is very much a product of the city’s vibrancy.”