Coney Island’s Loss Is Honduras’ . . .

The “Zipper” and the “Spider” sound like classics but have you ever gone on them for a ride? No matter, they’re off to Honduras now:

Two longtime Coney Island rides were shut down yesterday to be sent overseas, the latest casualties of a developer’s stalled bid to bring a $1.5 billion entertainment complex to the amusement district.

Workers yesterday began dismantling the Spider and Zipper rides near the West 12th Street shoreline, so both could be sent to an amusement park in Honduras.

The workers said the rides’ operator opted to sell the attractions after being unable to obtain a land-lease extension with developer Joseph Sitt, who owns 10 acres in the heart of the amusement district but is having difficulty getting city approval for his controversial project.

. . .

“I think people are in denial about what we’re facing for next year,” said Dianna Carlin, the owner of Lola Staar Souvenir Boutique on the boardwalk.

But a Sitt spokesman yesterday said the developer won’t let Coney Island become a ghost town and there will be plenty of amusements in future years.

Location Scout: Coney Island Amusement Core.

Eak, Another Lawyer!

And here you thought Coney Island wasn’t gentrifying:

For 15 years, Eak the Geek earned his living as a “freak” in the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, wowing thousands of spectacle seekers each summer with his spacey facial tattoos and signature stunt: the Bed of Nails sandwich.

Then he decided it was time for a career change. He thought he’d like to be a lawyer — maybe even a city councilman one day. And so Eak — whose given name is Eduardo Arrocha — is headed back to school at age 45.

“Coney Island was very good to me, but it was just time to go,” said Eak, in a recent phone interview from Lansing, Mich., where he will start classes in contracts, torts and constitutional law at Thomas M. Cooley Law School on Tuesday.

He left the sideshow, but Eak is careful to point out this new foray into law isn’t a rejection of his fellow freaks. On the contrary, he’s doing it to help them.

“I know it sounds weird, but I want to be a freak lawyer,” he said. “I hope to have a little office in New York and work with the alternative people . . . all the so-called riff-raff, to give them legal representation that is not judgmental.”

Eak is six feet tall with a clean-shaven head and burly 220-pound frame, and says he’s been deflecting suspicious side glances and many times open looks of disdain since he began the process of having his body tattooed from head-to-toe.

Maybe Jeremy Piven — Or If You’re Lucky, Wallace Shawn — Will Play You In The Feature Film

There are at least two acts in there somewhere (some enterprising whippersnapper needs to supply the third):

The Carroll Gardens widow who fought to die in the home she’d lived in her entire life, won a Pyrrhic victory this month — dying in the apartment on Aug. 12 and defeating a developer’s two-year-long quest to evict her.

Angelina Visconti, 88, died of natural causes at Long Island College Hospital, though she was still a resident of the Cheever Place rowhouse.

“She got her wish, and that was what it was all about,” said Leonard Visconti, her son. “She always said she was born here, she wanted to die here.”

Visconti’s residency became an issue in 2005, when her nephew Joseph DeLeonibus, the son of Visconti’s late twin sister, tried to evict her so he could make a killing in the booming Carroll Gardens real-estate market.

The house was eventually sold for $1.13 million to developer Wayne Warnock, who picked up the eviction proceedings where DeLeonibus left off.

Earlier: Notices To Quit Thicker Than Blood.

Manhattan, Eminent Domain, Robert Moses . . . Does It Get Any Better Than This?

It’s the American Songbook . . . and it always goes back to poor old Robert Moses:

The city wants to use its power of eminent domain to push out an almost-finished arts venue in Fort Greene to make way for a Manhattan-based dance troupe and 150 new housing units that comprise the centerpiece of the so-called BAM Cultural District.

“Our goal was to create a live music-and-arts venue,” said Todd Triplett, one of the three friends behind the Amber Art and Music Space, which is being built in a former liquor store at Fulton Street and Ashland Place.

Lured by the promise of the burgeoning “Lincoln Center of Brooklyn” that the city envisions for the area around BAM, Triplett and his partners invested more than $1 million, and spent a year and a half turning the run-down, three-story space into a performance venue, recording studio and an arts non-profit.

That grand idea was shattered on Aug. 21, when Jack Hammer, the director of Brooklyn Planning for the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, informed the three partners that the agency wants to seize the site by eminent domain to make way for the Dancespace Project, a Manhattan-based dance group.

“We were four weeks away from completion, and we get this letter. The city is f–king us,” said Triplett, who has already gotten a liquor license and booked musical acts into 2008. “I’ve never seen anything this egregious. This is in the tradition of Robert Moses.”

The partners claim that no one — including the broker who secured them the space and the landlord, who let them sign a 10-year lease and has collected $200,000 in rent so far — informed them of the city’s plans for the site.

“We refinanced our homes to do this,” said Triplett, standing shell-shocked amid construction materials in the area that would have housed the main lounge. “We took second jobs.”

Shebam! Pow! Blop! Fizz!

In the recession years of the early 90s Harlem’s real estate was in much better shape compared to that of the East Village simply because of Upper Manhattan’s excellent subway access, something people on Columbia Street in Brooklyn are realizing today:

Two years ago Freddy Saint-Aignan and his wife, Angelika, found the perfect location for their fledgling bar/restaurant, the Sugar Lounge: Columbia Street in Brooklyn.

The building was just the right size, had a spacious backyard garden and sat beside Upper New York Bay. The city had big plans for the area: green space and parks, cruise ship piers a few blocks away

The Columbia Street Waterfront District, as it is called, was going to be resurrected to its past stature as a social and commercial hub. It was going to rival Smith Street in Boerum Hill, which had gone through a renaissance, attracting high-end boutiques and specialty stores, restaurants and a steadily swelling flow of shoppers and diners.

But that was two years ago, and instead of a silver lining along the Manhattan skyline, which the Saint-Aignans can see from the lounge’s front window, they see the outstretched arms of backhoes, cranes and industrial containers. Where there was to be a park across the street there is shredded earth, construction vehicles and exposed sewer pipes. The sidewalk is dirty and ragged, and aside from the occasional dog walker, jogger or in-line skater (along smoother stretches) there is very little foot traffic.

At night, the street outside the lounge is dark, the street lights dimmed by damage and disrepair. The promises of better days for Columbia Street have crumbled like the sidewalk in front of the Sugar Lounge, Mr. Saint-Aignan said yesterday.

“Smith Street has everything,” Mr. Saint-Aignan said from his cozy lounge, pointing out the contrast with Columbia Street. “With all the construction, there is no place for parking. We have no access, no subway, no buses. At night we have no lights.”

The Columbia Street corridor has struggled to propel itself into the orbit of the Brooklyn revival. Depending on whom you ask, the Columbia Street commercial strip is in Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens or — more recently — Red Hook. It is bordered on the west by New York Bay, on the east by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, on the north by Atlantic Avenue, and on the south by the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

Mr. Saint-Aignan, formerly the general manager of Bar Tabac on Smith Street, said he had had to take on two other jobs to stay afloat.

The wishful thinking about Columbia Street’s being the new Smith Street goes only so far. The magical combination that makes one street hot and another tepid can seem elusive, but not here, where the reasons for the stalled revival are painfully clear. Continuing construction, a sense of geographic isolation and waning buzz continue to hush the “pop” that speculators had predicted.

For a while, “everyone wanted to come,” said Frank Manzione, who owns a real estate company on Columbia Street. “There were new condos being built, more people were moving in. A lot of the stores that were closed up started to get rented.”