It’ll Be Like Staying At A Toys “R” Us!

Now here’s an idea:

City Hall wants to kill a $1.5-billion plan to turn Coney Island into a fantasyland of hotels, amusements and rides — but down on the boardwalk, at least one ride operator is singing a different tune.

“Stranger things have happened than a hotel atrium built around a Ferris wheel,” said Dennis Vourderis, owner of Coney’s landmarked Wonder Wheel ride and operator of Deno’s Wonder Wheel Park, most of which was recently sold to embattled Coney developer Joe Sitt by Vourderis’ landlord Jack Ward.

Vourderis retains a 13-year lease to the boardwalk park, but he told The Brooklyn Paper that he would consider selling his lease for the chance to build a Wonder Wheel hotel.

“With creativity and a lot of money, it could be awesome,” he said.

Location Scout: The Wonder Wheel.

Do You Really Want Cameras Installed At The Beach? Perv!

Staten Island Councilmember suggests installing security cameras at New Dorp Beach Park:

Days after New Dorp Beach Park was vandalized, City Councilman James Oddo visited the site and urged Staten Islanders to voice their opinions on whether or not security cameras should be installed there.

“What we’re trying to do is ask Staten Islanders what they want. Do they want cameras in our parks?” asked Oddo. “They can call or e-mail us. They can make their voice heard.”

“If the decision was mine, I would do it. But it’s not, it should be Staten Islanders.”

Aiming cameras at beachgoers . . . interesting . . . but you know what bored CCTV operators do, don’t you?

Then again, why put in the real thing when you can just use a decoy?

Any Port In A Storm

Educators are resorting to whatever it takes to improve their school environment:

A principal who took an unusual approach to improve her TriBeCa high school — allegedly hiring a “black magic” practitioner to cleanse evil spirits through a ceremony involving sprinkled chicken blood — is being forced out a month before the school year starts. A replacement principal has not yet been named.

“There was always a running joke that, because many of the students were ill-behaved, we should use sage to cleanse the building,” an assistant principal at the Unity Center for Urban Technologies on Sixth Avenue, Melody Crooks-Simpson, told city investigators. Then, during midwinter break in early 2006, Ms. Crooks-Simpson said, Principal Maritza Tamayo invited her to a Santeria ceremony that would involve chicken blood, according to a report released yesterday by the Department of Education’s special commissioner of investigation, Richard Condon.

Ms. Crooks-Simpson said she did not attend that ceremony but did go to a second rite where a woman, Gilda Fonte, shuffled Tarot cards under a cloud of cigar smoke. The assistant principal said she was later pressured to pay $900 toward Ms. Fonte’s fee for the service.

. . .

Investigators did not interview anyone who attended the first Santeria ceremony mentioned by Ms. Crooks-Simpson. But a computer technician, Keenan Britt, told them he saw the principal and two women walk into the school over the midwinter break dressed in white clothing and white headdresses. One balanced 40 lighted candles on her head atop a stainless steel tray, he told investigators.

It’s Not That No One Else Has A Driver More Than It Is That No One Else Goes To The Trouble Of Acting Like They Actually Take The Subway

Not only does a caravan of SUVs follow his subway commute on surface streets but they first actually take him to the subway stop — and not the local stop, either:

He is public transportation’s loudest cheerleader, boasting that he takes the subway “virtually every day.” He has told residents who complain about overcrowded trains to “get real” and he constantly encourages New Yorkers to follow his environmentally friendly example.

But Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s commute is not your average straphanger’s ride.

On mornings that he takes the subway from home, Mr. Bloomberg is picked up at his Upper East Side town house by a pair of king-size Chevrolet Suburbans. The mayor is driven 22 blocks to the subway station at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue, where he can board an express train to City Hall. His drivers zip past his neighborhood station, a local subway stop a five-minute walk away.

That means Mr. Bloomberg — whose much-discussed subway rides have become an indelible component of his public image — spends a quarter of his ostensibly subterranean commute in an S.U.V.

. . .

The mayor’s chief spokesman, Stu Loeser, was asked in an interview yesterday whether being driven to an express station distanced Mr. Bloomberg from the experience of the average Manhattan subway rider. Mr. Loeser replied, “Who is the average Manhattan subway-goer? I don’t think it’s an answerable question. The mayor rides the subway like anyone else. Zips his card through, stands on the platform, and waits for a train to come.”

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority chuckled when asked how common it is for Manhattan residents to be driven to the subway. “Where would you drive from in Manhattan to a subway station? That would be pretty crazy,” the spokesman, Jeremy Soffin, said. Told of the mayor’s morning routine, he added, “Most people don’t have chauffeurs.”

And most people don’t have reporters from The New York Times watching their travels, as Mr. Bloomberg did for five weeks. Almost every morning, two Suburbans waited outside his East 79th Street town house, sometimes with engines idling and windows up, until their charge was ready to leave. Uniformed police officers and the mayor’s security detail flanked the doorway as Mr. Bloomberg emerged and ducked into one of the waiting vehicles.

As they head to the express subway, they pass two No. 6 local stops, at 77th Street and 68th Street. They pull up to the 59th Street station, across the street from Bloomingdale’s.

And if you’re still thinking “Presidential candidate,” this is way, way better than any $400 haircut.

On Lowering Expectations To Virtually Nothing (MTA Take Note!)

That the 1 train provides the best service, according to the Straphangers Campaign, is reason enough to stop you in your tracks (ugh). (If it’s so good, why bother with that fancy new train station then? Maybe because 1 train service actually sucks?)

So then it must be just a big joke that the G is rated “most reliable”? As in, it’s the most reliably sucky train? Read the report (.pdf) to find that the “G line ranks tied for 5th place out of the 22 subway lines.” No kidding!