Riegelmann boardwalk with the Parachute Jump in the background. (Rose D'souza / Brooklyn Ink)

The former Bensonhurst resident made the trip from New Jersey to grab a couple of Nathan’s Famous hotdogs and stroll down the vacant strip with his son, Nick Jr. His son has been living in Germany, and DiRaimondo tries to take him back to Coney whenever Nick Jr. comes home.

“This is the spirit, the Wonder Wheel, all of what you see is here. The old shops – the places that have been here for a long time. This is what Coney Island is all about,” DiRaimondo says.

Both father and son excitedly look around but nostalgia seems to shelter them from noticing what has become of the place. Graffiti covers the doors of many of the boardwalk shops, many of which closed for good after the end of this year’s season.

Further down the boardwalk’s western section is a graveyard of school buses right next to the vacant but landmarked Childs restaurant building. And just off the boardwalk, vacant lots also dot Surf Avenue, one of Coney’s main arteries.

The city has embarked on the latest of many attempts to restore the increasingly blighted area to its former glory.

The effort began in 2009, when the city bought 6.9 acres of land for $95.6 million from developer, Joseph Sitt, a native Brooklynite and created an economic development plan.  Sections of the plan have already been implemented, such a rezoning Coney’s amusement district to make room for hotels, retail shops, and approximately 5000 residential units.

Coney’s tourism has increased in the two years since the plan began. Last summer was one of Coney Island’s best summers in recent years, with 200,000 more visitors than the previous year. At least 400 jobs were created, and the planned economic development projects the creation of at least 6,000 new permanent jobs.

Many locals are against the city’s plan, however, and change is becoming a dirty word among some of those with a stake in Coney Island.

Opposition is led by an organization called Save Coney Island, which states its fear that “the city’s rezoning plan for Coney Island would forever destroy the dream of a revitalized, world-class Coney Island.”

Central to the opposition is the concern that the promised financial benefits will be too expensive for local residents, many of whom are low-income and live in the public housing buildings that surround the boardwalk. An estimated 45 percent of residents in Community Board 13, which includes Coney Island, received income support, according to the 2010 Census, up from 30 percent in the 2000 census.

The struggle between the city’s push to revive Coney and the local desire to maintain the area’s historic presence seems to be taking place right on the boardwalk, in Ruby’s Bar and Grill.

A favorite Coney destination during the summer season, Ruby’s is arguably the heart and soul of Coney’s amusement district. The beer is cheap, the atmosphere is easy going and the wall behind the bar is covered with pictures of historic scenes of packed beaches and smiling faces. Ruby’s has always represented one of the last fleeting connections to Coney’s glorious yesteryears.

Today, the restaurant better symbolizes what’s at stake in the city’s controversial economic development plan. For the second year in a row, Ruby’s has been negotiating a long-term lease agreement with the city and Central Amusement International, a developer that has a ten-year contract with the city to operate in the amusement district.

The city wants to make Coney a year-round attraction that includes sit-down restaurants with a more formal dining experience. Until recently customers at restaurants like Ruby’s just ordered food from the bar.

Although Ruby’s is rooted in its past, change is coming to the boardwalk’s oldest restaurant.

Michael Sarrel and his wife Melody – whose father, Ruby Jacobs, was the original owner – are trying to upgrade the place to comply with the stipulations in the lease negotiations. Simply put, Ruby’s has to renovate if it wants to be included in the city’s plan for Coney’s future.

On a sunny day in late November, Michael and a couple of his workers are rebuilding the flooring behind the bar as people stream into the restaurant – the only one on the boardwalk with its doors open. Despite the chairs stacked on top of each other, and the sounds of hammers and saw blades cutting into wood, many of the curious passersby ask if Ruby’s is still serving food. Michael, not missing a beat, charismatically offers visitors the choice of a “liquid lunch” from the only items he has left in his fridge: beer, soda, water.

As customers sit outside on plastic white chairs and sip beer, the jukebox randomly blares a classic song over the speakers, almost as if to remind everyone of the restaurant’s loud, bustling atmosphere that takes place during the summer season.

“Things are going forward and not reverse, so I guess that’s a good thing,” Michael says, as he takes a rare break from constructing the new floors. “We got a mix of everybody. That’s, you know, one of the things that I’m afraid might go away from this upscale dining experience that the city is looking to create here.”

***

Upscale. Fancy. Expensive. Commercial. These words are thrown around in debates about Coney’s future. The neighborhood comprises a tight-knit community that, with organizations like Save Coney Island, is intent on holding on to Coney’s spirit as the city and other developers move forward with their plans.

But the neighborhood languishes in the off season, lacking year-around grocery stories and retail shops near the amusement district. Coney Island has the feel of a living museum that, while full of rich history, remains stagnant for most of the year, only coming back to life in the months that exist between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

In fact, there have been moments of great prosperity and affluence in the long history of the park.

“One time Coney Island was innovative. It’s all about innovation,” says Cezar Del Valle, a Brooklyn theater historian who helped to successfully advocate for Coney’s Shore Theater to receive landmark status.

In the late 1870s, rapid construction of railroads, ocean piers, and hotels made Coney Island a popular destination for wealthy tourists and vacationing New Yorkers. Weight-guessers, ball toss games, and jugglers who breathed fire were the kind of entertainment Coney had to offer, according Michael Immerso’s Coney Island: The People’s Playground.

Coney’s cheap fun – home of five cent hotdogs and beer – attracted European immigrant laborers who were also looking for jobs. Three massive amusement parks opened – Luna Park, Steeplechase Park, Dreamland – which made Coney an international renowned destination for extravagant entertainment.

“The thing is, as a part of the beginning, Coney Island frequently was an upscale place, the original Coney Island. It morphed into the ‘people’s playground’, and that’s what it’s known for and that’s what it’s famous for,” says theater historian Del Valle.

Concert venues, dance halls, and cabarets also helped to develop Coney’s honky-tonk, rebellious character in spite of the blue laws that enforced religious observances on Sunday. Legendary stories like the one about gangster Al Capone receiving his famous scar in a fight while working as a Coney bartender, further cultivated Coney’s gritty reputation.

Luna Park, 1905 (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, LC-D4-18325)

Luna Park, between 1903 and 1910 (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, LC-D4-33798)

Picnicking at Coney Island, between 1900 and 1905 (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, LC-D4-60012)

By the 1920, the subway line reached Coney Island and brought in larger crowds who benefitted from the five cent fares for the subway and the amusements. The Riegelmann boardwalk was built to accommodate the surge of visitors. The park became known for the most famous rollercoasters in the country, with creation of the Tornado and the Cyclone.

But at least half of Coney’s attractions were lost during the Great Depression when even a nickel was too expensive to part with. A series of fires over the years destroyed several hotels and attractions. In 1944, the original Luna Park was unable to survive a major fire, and closed by the end of the season.

During this time, Coney’s development came under the direction of top urban planner, Robert Moses, who expanded the beaches to make room for the large crowds but enforced strict rules to control public behavior. By the 1950s, Moses significantly reduced Coney’s amusement district and replaced the space with residential units and public housing.

Soon after, however, the last major amusement park, Steeplechase Park, closed in 1964. Consequently, Coney attracted fewer visitors, especially with an increase in crime in the area due to the crack epidemic that plagued the city. Between the 1980s and 1990s, several urban renewal plans fell through, when the city was unable to negotiate with developers.

Since the 1990s, Coney’s future started to look brighter. Crime has greatly declined according to the NYPD’s statistics.

Michael Sarrel has noticed the gradual demographic differences of Ruby’s customers over the years. “You have more families. People aren’t afraid of Coney Island anymore like they used to be.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg took interest in developing Coney as a possible site for the 2012 Olympics, which he hoped would come to the city. When the bid fell through, Bloomberg continued to invest in the area, stating in 2005 that “by demonstrating a serious commitment to improve the area, the administration hopes to serve as a catalyst for private investment.”

In a controversial move, developer, Joseph Sitt, bought over $100 million in Coney property by 2007 with the intention of creating a new Las Vegas-styled entertainment venue. Many locals blame Sitt for kicking out neighborhood businesses and creating the vacant lots in order to flip the land for more than it had been worth.

After years of debating over Coney’s future, the city stepped in and bought the 6.9 acres of land from Sitt in 2009.

***

Today, a walk down the Riegelmann boardwalk may allow you to eavesdrop on a spirited conversation spoken in Russian or peek at a wedding party photo shoot or watch a family ride their bikes together. In the background, however, are the closed shops and vacant lots, which the city hopes will turn around once its expansive economic development plans are fully implemented and become profitable.

An elderly woman sits in front of the historic Childs building located on the western section of Coney's boardwalk. (Rose D'souza / Brooklyn Ink)

So far, the city seems to be boosting Coney’s economy while still attempting to maintain ties to its past. In 2010, Luna Park opened and became the city’s first major development since rolling out its economic plan, attracting more visitors. In November, the city broke ground to build Steeplechase Plaza, another entertainment center designated for retail shops. Both places received their names in honor of the original 20^th century amusement parks that heralded Coney Island’s glory days. And Steeplechase Plaza will be the new home for the historic B&B Carousell that the city restored for $2 million.

“The amusement parks and their concessions have already created over 400 new jobs, and thanks to outreach through the city’s hiring program – HireNYC – approximately half were filled by residents of the local communities,” says Kyle Sklerov, who represents the city’s Coney Island Development Corporation.

But Coney’s old guard wants to make it clear that while urban renewal is welcome, it remains cautious of what the city, Sitt, and other urban planners envision.

“The future of Coney Island remains uncertain.” Says Juan Rivero, the spokesperson for Save Coney Island.

“Thus far, the city’s program has been mitigating the damage and instability caused by its rezoning.  Another way of bringing about economic benefit to the area might have been for the city to scrap the rezoning plan, support existing businesses, and devote the $100 million dollars with which it rewarded [Joseph Sitt’s company] Thor Equities’ speculation on persistently vacant private land and on public improvements.  That moment, however, has passed.”

A yard full of school buses next to the Childs building on Coney's boardwalk. (Rose D'souza / Brooklyn Ink)

Rivero and Save Coney Island are also concerned that many locals won’t be able to afford the 5,000 new housing units the city plans to build and that the construction jobs created from the economic development will go to residents outside of Coney Island.

The economic gain, therefore, may be fleeting even though retail rent has increased since the rezoning in 2009, according to Brian Hanson, the director of sales for realtor Massey Knakal’s Brooklyn division.

“I believe that [retail rent] will continue to rise based on the popularity of the area. As it continues to be more popular, rents can rise but I think that is going to be determined by how productive the space is. “

But Hanson says that although retail rent has increased by 10 to 15 percent since the 2009 rezoning, he doesn’t believe local businesses will be priced out of the area.

“Will it get to a point where it is like Broadway or SoHo where you have to be a major national retail tenant to afford it, and the profit margins are very slim? That I don’t know, but it’s a long time away. I think for right now, with the current rent, local businessmen can rent space and make money if they have good product or service to offer.”

The boardwalk's western section is also the site of the future Steeplechase Plaza. Construction began in November. (Rose D'souza / Brooklyn ink)

Joseph Sitt’s Thor Equities is also in the process of negotiating rental rates to retailers. Thor still owns more than five acres of land and plans to build a movie theater and hotel on Stillwell Avenue, south of Surf Avenue.

Stefan Friedman, Thor’s press representative, says that the company sympathizes with the locals’ concerns but believes that rent and living commodities are naturally going to increase because of the ongoing investment in Coney. Friedman suggests that the price increases are a short-term consequence that will yield long-term financial benefits for the entire neighborhood.

“How many people are working along the boardwalk in the winter? Very few, at a time when you need to create jobs [and] at a time when unemployment is extremely high,” Friedman explains.

Robert Dankner also believes that Coney’s gentrification will benefit the neighborhood without losing its cultural identity. “It’s less about making [Coney] upscale, and more about changing the landscape so that there are things to do there for people other than the residents. It just brings money into the community as it would with any community.” Dankner’s real estate company represents Horace Bullard, who owns three acres of land that is within Coney’s new zoning boundaries.

***

For now, Michael Sarrel and his family are celebrating –they found out in early December that Ruby’s lease was renewed for eight years.

“It’s a new challenge for us,” Michael says, as he considers what’s in Ruby’s future. “We have to redevelop the place, rebuild the place – there’s going to be different dynamics in Coney Island than there were before so we’re both anxious and excited.”

There’s some hesitation in Michael’s voice even though he is happy that Ruby’s is staying on the boardwalk.

“[The city] wants a more uniformed look to the boardwalk. So if you look at the boardwalk now each store has it’s own unique personality and look.” Michael admits that the boardwalk could use a facelift. “It’s all dicey looking and needs to be cleaned up but now they want everything to sort of fit, for everything to seam together.”

Coney’s gentrification will likely remain a controversial, politicized issue as current investments secure and expand future development, especially for residents like Michael who want to see their businesses succeed but also want to protect Coney’s cultural identity.

“It’s tough to deal with thousands and thousands of opinions when you’re trying to get a project moving forward,” says Brian Hanson, the real estate agent.

“But it is important to listen to those thousands and thousands of people who are ultimately going to make your project successful or not.”

Protestors hold signs at Coney Island march on Wednesday afternoon (Esteban Illades / The Brooklyn Ink)

The coalition was made up of approximately 70 people who braved the wind and cold.

Under the banner of “Budget Cuts Hurt Our Schools”, Mike Schirtzer, the organizer and a History teacher at Leon M. Goldstein High School, said that the march was “a pro-student rally.” Schirtzer said that his school has had to eliminate many after-school programs, advanced placement classes, and just the number of classes in general. “Students have holes in their schedules in the middle of the day, and they don’t get four-years worth of math and science” he said.

Students were the most vocal. Changing the lyrics to an old Twisted Sister song, they sang,  “You can’t cut our budget anymore!”.

One of the singers turned bright red when another student recorded her with her phone.

Jessica Kallo, a 16-year old who attends Goldstein High School, complained in particular about the budget for science and math classes. “Our high school focuses on math and science. It’s absurd that that’s what they’re cutting!” she said.

She was worried that this might damage her application to college.

“We want to raise awareness,” said Kit Wainer, a social studies teacher. “There is a [state] legislature meeting in spring [about the education budget], and Mayor Bloomberg has already announced more budget cuts.”

Mike Schirtzer, a Brooklyn history teacher and protest organizer at Wednesday' s march (Esteban Illades / The Brooklyn Ink)

The march was peaceful and protesters were upbeat. The march started at the corner opposite of Nathan’s restaurant, near the boardwalk, and ended in front of Abraham Lincoln High School, where a small rally was held.

Upon arrival, a small stepladder was brought out and representatives from different groups took turns speaking. Almost all of the protestors wore bright orange stickers on their shirts. “Some cuts don’t heal,” read the stickers. A few students from Lincoln High joined the event.

Howard Schoor, Brooklyn Representative for the United Federation of Teachers, said that the budget for local public schools has been cut 13 percent over the last three years and that about 7,000 teachers in New York City have been laid off. “They say ‘cutback’, we say ‘fight back’,” he shouted through a megaphone. He said that this struggle was part of a larger one, and made a passing reference to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Members of the Transport Workers Union (Chapters 100 and 101) were also present. The representatives from the 101 pledged the support of their 1,500 members to the coalition. Tim Schermerhorn, from Local 100 and a protest veteran, called it “the beginning of a long struggle.”

Kit Wainer, a social studies teacher and the rally's co-organizer (Esteban Illades / The Brooklyn Ink)

The last speaker was Farin Kautz, 23, a student at CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College. Kingsborough teachers and students have been participating in ongoing protests against tuition increases.

“It’s ironic… While you’re getting your budget cut, we’re getting tuition hikes,” Kautz told the crowd.

At the site of Alla Kamenev's murder, neighbors left a card of remembrance. Anna Hiatt/ The Brooklyn Ink

Ten seconds after he enters the frame of the surveillance video, he’s gone.

The man on the bicycle pulls himself over the curb and begins to pedal down the sidewalk of West Brighton Avenue, headed toward West First Street. The timestamp reads 11:44:49. He moves past cars waiting for the traffic light at Ocean Parkway, past a restaurant, a pharmacy and a supermarket, their signs all in Russian. The day is October 20, just before noon, in Brighton Beach.

Five minutes later and two blocks away, Alla Kamenev lies dying on the sidewalk. She is bleeding onto the pavement in broad daylight next to the black wrought-iron fence separating Asser Levy Park from Sea Breeze Avenue. She is 65 years old and will be pronounced dead at Coney Island Hospital that afternoon.

Later that day, police learned from witnesses that the person who had shot her was a man on a bicycle wearing a white baseball cap, two-toned jacket, blue pants and white sneakers. After shooting Alla three times in the torso, he pedaled away.

Police talked with an employee at the medical supply store who had seen the shooting happen. They talked with Vlad Godin, reportedly her lover—it is unclear whether they are married—who shared an apartment with her at Brightwater Towers at 601 B Surf Ave., just three blocks away. They talked with her son, Vsevolod Kamenev, who lives with his father, Dimitry—Alla’s estranged husband—in what was once her home on Brighton 7th Street. They canvassed the neighborhood looking to talk with anyone who might know something about why a 65-year-old woman had been killed in a safe neighborhood in the middle of the day.

This is a story filled with mysteries set in a corner of Brooklyn where people refer to the Atlantic Ocean as the Black Sea. It is Little Odessa. Whatever neighbors may know about the relationship between Alla and Dimitry Kamenev, they keep to themselves. She was, in fact, so little known that in the makeshift memorial set up at the site of her murder, a card reads: “We never knew you in life but we mourn your passing as neighbors.”

This is what is known. On October 25, police arrested and charged Dimitry Kamenev with criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree and murder in the second degree. Police allege that Dimitry was the man who approached Alla on a bicycle and shot her three times before riding away.

Bernard Udell, Dimitry’s defense attorney, met his client for the first time last week. Dimitry, he said, was walking with “a couple of canes,” but appeared to be in good health “for a man his age.” They spoke to each other through a translator—Dimitry speaks limited English, Udell doesn’t speak Russian. One thing Udell does know is that Dimitry denies the charges against him.

This is not Dimitry’s first run-in with the law. In 1988 and again in 1991, he was arrested for allegedly committing assault, according to the New York Police Department. The charges were dropped in 1988; the record doesn’t show why. In 1991, Dimitry was indicted on charges of reckless endangerment in the first degree and two charges of criminal possession of a weapon. He pled guilty to the charge of third-degree criminal possession on Nov. 15 and was sentenced on Dec. 6. He spent the next two months at the Eric M. Taylor Center on Rikers Island and was discharged on Feb. 14, 1992. That’s where his criminal record ended.

Dimitry lives in the house on Brighton 7th Street at the intersection of Neptune Avenue that Alla purchased in 1994. In 2007, Alla signed the deed for 2851 Brighton 7th St. over to her son Vsevolod Kamenev, and a year later, she bought an apartment on Surf Avenue. The Kamenev house sits on a residential block adjacent to a Pakistani fabric shop and across the street from a laundromat and a day care center.

The immediate Kamenev family consisted of Alla, Dimitry and their two sons, Vsevolod and Alexey. The former lives in the house on Brighton 7th Street. The latter lived in New York and currently resides in Illinois.

The rest of the story remains a mystery.

Since the day she died, police and reporters have descended on the block asking the Kamenevs and their neighbors about Alla’s family and her life. Eleven days after she died, they couldn’t or wouldn’t talk. Detectives told Kamenev’s next door neighbor he couldn’t speak about Dimitry to the press. Those inside the Kamenev house wouldn’t. A blonde-haired woman refused to open the front door for reporters and shooed them away as she peered through the white slatted blinds covering the front window.

Later that day, a man who refused to identify himself but who matched the description of Vsevolod and who was wearing a blue auto mechanic jumpsuit with a patch reading “KAMENEV” on the left breast, spoke long enough to say, “I don’t talk to reporter. This is a private matter.” He turned and walked back toward the house.

Alla had owned a fifth-floor apartment at Brightwater Towers since 2008. She was living there with Vlad Godin at the time of her murder. She had recently retired, and Godin said in a TV interview that they were looking forward to spending more time together. The fluorescent lighting makes the lobby of their building feel like a hospital. A security guard at the front desk monitors security cameras and checks in guests. Down the hall, past the laundry room, sit the elevators.

Vlad Godin had seen his fair share of reporters over the last eleven days. On Halloween, he answered yet another knock on his door to find yet another reporter waiting outside. “You’re the third one today,” Godin said, leaning his head against the door and blocking the view of his apartment.

He was quiet, and his eyes were red. The TV blared in the background and the shades of his apartment were drawn. He sounded tired when he said he didn’t want to talk. He didn’t close the door, but he didn’t volunteer more words.

On the streets of Brighton Beach, even those far removed from the Kamenev family had no answers to questions about Alla, Dimitry, or the day that he allegedly killed her. Stan, the owner of the Pharmacy Anteka on Brighton Beach Avenue, had a little to contribute: Alla had purchased medication once at the store one year ago. None of the staff at Anteka remembered her, though; they found her name when going through their customer database after hearing about the murder. Stan had also seen Dimitry walking in the neighborhood, though they had never interacted. That was the extent of what he knew about the Kamenevs.

“I’m not surprised it could be an ex-husband who did it,” he said, pausing to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. “But I’m surprised someone that age could have a gun or do that.”

At the site of her murder, the makeshift memorial for Alla Kamenev consisted of two wilted bouquets of roses, a candle burnt down to its wick and a Ziploc bag containing the card from neighbors who barely knew her. The factory-printed message read, “In this time of sorrow, please know that you are not alone.” Inside the card for Alla, they bid her farewell and wrote, invoking God’s name in Hebrew, “May Hashem keep you.”

Courtesy DCPI

**

More coverage of Alla Kamenev’s murder by The Brooklyn Ink:

76-Year-Old Coney Island Man Indicted for Ex-Wife’s Murder | Mon., Oct. 31, 2011
Suspect Arrested in Brighton Beach Shooting | Tues., Oct. 25, 2011

Kamenev was arrested Tuesday, Oct. 25 and charged with the murder of Alla Kamenev. Bernard Udell, Kamenev’s defense attorney, said his client denies the charges.

Alla Kamenev was shot dead by a man riding a child’s bicycle at 11:50 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 20 at the corner of West Second Street and Seabreeze Avenue in Coney Island. She died on route to Coney Island Hospital.

On Thursday, police said that Dimitry shot Alla multiple times and rode off on a girl’s bicycle. Alla was later sent to Coney Island Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Police still do not know the gunman’s motive.

Stay tuned for further updates.

Dimitry Kamenev, 76, of Brighton Beach has been charged with Murder and Criminal Use of a Firearm. It is not yet known if the victim and suspect are related.

Alla Kamenev, of 601 B Surf Ave., died on Coney Island after being shot three times in the torso.  Police say that the suspect was recorded on a videotape riding a girl’s bicycle with a red basket.

She appears to have been little known by her neighbors, who describe her as a quiet woman who kept to herself. Some who lived in her building said they did not know her, nor had her heard about her murder.

If you knew Alla Kamenev and would like to speak with us about her, please contact  The Brooklyn Ink at thebrooklynink@gmail.com.

The boardwalk was supposed to undergoing a $5 million makeover according to NY1, but that deal has fallen through.

For more on the story, click here.

Hundreds stroll on the Coney Island boardwalk on a recent weekday afternoon.
(Photo: Mike Walker/The Brooklyn Ink)

Rose, 19, of Williamsburg, looked concerned when she heard about the plan to place a strip of concrete in the center of the boardwalk. “It would take away from the attractiveness of the boardwalk,” Rose said, “that exciting feeling of going to the beach.”

Zanora had a different take on the hybrid concrete/plastic-wood boardwalk, which the city said costs less money than wood. “If it means more money for the city,” he put it, “then that’s a good thing.”

The two friends’ debate — tradition and aesthetics versus cost and convenient maintenance — is being played out on a larger stage as the city moves forward with its $30 million plan to renovate the iconic boardwalk, the setting for The Drifters’ song “Under the Boardwalk” and almost universally understood shorthand for a beachfront amusement park. In 2010, Travel and Leisure magazine named Coney Island the best beach boardwalk in the United States.

The city has proposed renovating the eastern stretch of the boardwalk in Brighton Beach from Coney Island Avenue to Brighton 15th Street with recycled plastic designed to look like wood and a 12-foot-wide concrete strip in the center. The westernmost portion of the boardwalk from West 37th Street to West 33rd Street in Coney Island has already been redone in all concrete, as has a section of the boardwalk between Ocean Avenue and Brighton 1st Street. The amusement district between West 15th and West 10th streets — home of the amusement parks and the Cyclone roller coaster — would remain all wood in the city’s plan.

Parks Department spokeswoman Meghan Lalor said Mayor Michael Bloomberg directed all city agencies in 2007 to reduce the use of tropical hardwoods in public projects because of concerns about deforestation. However, Lalor said that a concrete boardwalk offers benefits beyond environmental conservation.

“Concrete is more resilient than wood to weather conditions, lasts longer, requires less maintenance and holds up better to pedestrian traffic and emergency vehicle traffic,” Lalor said.

Coney Island resident Todd Dobrin is president of Friends of the Boardwalk, a community group formed in t he late 1990s to help clean up the boardwalk. Dobrin said he disagreed that concrete is more resilient than wood. Plus, he added, it looks awful.

“This is like an outdoor patio in someone’s backyard,” Dobrin exclaimed as he walked the all-concrete stretch of the boardwalk at Ocean Parkway. He pointed out dozens of hairline cracks in the sand-colored, textured concrete. That concrete is not even a year old yet, he said.

Dobrin said that Brooklyn Borough President Edward Riegelmann had the right idea when he drove the first stake into the ground to build Coney Island’s wood boardwalk on Sept. 21, 1921.“There’s no proof that concrete lasts longer than a boardwalk,” Dobrin says. “Salt water is not concrete’s friend. This wood boardwalk has lasted for 90 years. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”

Friends of the Boardwalk helped rally members on the local Community Board to reject the city’s boardwalk renovation plan by a 21 to 7 vote in May. Since the board’s vote is only advisory, the Parks Department will make the final decision over the renovation. Lalor declined to say when that decision would be made.

According to the Parks Department, the cost of renovating the boardwalk with textured concrete is $90 per square foot. The concrete center strip with recycled plastic decking is $114 per square foot. Wood bumps the price up even higher, to $120 per square foot for concrete with wood decking and $140 per square foot for all wood.

Dobrin disputed those figures and said that the real reason the city wants to use concrete is because so many city vehicles drive on the boardwalk.

However, State Assembly member Alec Brook-Krasny, who supports the Parks Department plan, said the length of the boardwalk — about two-and-a-half miles from Coney Island to Brighton Beach — makes concrete necessary.

“It’s a long stretch of Boardwalk from Brighton to Coney Island, and we have to have a part of the boardwalk for emergency vehicles,” Brook-Krasny said. “To say otherwise wouldn’t be practical. The reason I’m supporting it is that we really have to think about the fiscal implications. Wood is very bad environmentally and fiscally.”

It’s not the first time the city government has proposed changes to the character of the boardwalk, according to Brooklyn Borough Historian Ron Schweiger. After a strong nor’easter in December 1992 swept the ocean all the way to Surf Avenue, city officials filled in the space under the boardwalk with tons of sand. The sand-filled boardwalk served as a bulwark against storm-stirred tides and also prevented homeless people from camping underneath, where their fires would sometimes damage the wooden planks.

“You can’t go ‘under the boardwalk’ anymore,” Schweiger said.

The wood-vs.-concrete arguments sound familiar to Donna Abbott, communications manager for Ocean City, Md., a municipality that recently undertook a controversial renovation plan for its three-mile boardwalk.

“You have to look at cost and making sure you get the best project at the best price, but the strong ties people have with a boardwalk make this a complex issue,” Abbott said.

According to Abbott, Ocean City’s mayor and city council looked at three options for the boardwalk: a traditional wood boardwalk, a wood surface with a “wood-stamped” concrete center lane, and a wood surface with a plain concrete center lane.

After a public hearing at which traditionalists came out strongly in favor of an all-wood boardwalk and the publication of online poll on the city’s website that got similar results, city officials voted to build the traditional all-wood boardwalk with North American yellow pine instead of tropical hardwood.

Ocean City, Md., city engineer Terry McGean said the all-wood boardwalk will end up costing about $1.5 million more than concrete: $500,000 in initial costs and another $1 million over the 50-year life of the project because the boards will need to be replaced every 10 years while concrete requires less maintenance. McGean said concrete supports under the boardwalk will allow the all-pine boardwalk to carry emergency vehicles, and that Ocean City’s fire chief demanded the boardwalk be strong enough to carry the city’s largest fire truck.

McGean said he understands both sides of the concrete-versus-wood argument. “As an engineer, concrete makes more sense,” he said. “But I’ve learned that politics is just as real as gravity.”

For Dobrin, the Coney Island boardwalk renovation is not just an engineering problem. He said the romance and history of the boardwalk create a powerful argument for a concrete-free boardwalk even if it does cost more than concrete.

“What’s more important, Times Square pedestrian plazas or the world-famous Riegelmann’s Boardwalk?” Dobrin said. “Imagine Las Vegas without gambling, that’s Coney Island without a boardwalk.”

A chimney towers over the sarcophagus that covers the destroyed Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

When Dmitriy Khavin had a routine physical four years ago, his doctor noticed something amiss in the blood test. Though Khavin had no symptoms of illness, the test showed his thyroid gland was underactive. Hearing that, Khavin immediately thought of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Khavin is now 37 and lives in New York City, where he works as a video producer and camera operator, but on April 26, 1986, he was 11 years old and living in the Soviet Union about 370 miles from the Chernobyl nuclear plant when the its No. 4 reactor exploded, spewing radioactive fallout over 93,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of Wyoming.

“It’s always in the back of my mind sitting there,” Khavin said. “I don’t think about it daily, but when health issues come up, you can’t help but think about it.”

Khavin’s thyroid condition is treatable and he shouldn’t have any long-term medical consequences, he said. However, thyroid disease — especially thyroid cancer — remains an insidious vestige of the Chernobyl accident, and thyroid-cancer rates in Coney Island and Brighton Beach, which have a large number of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, are significantly higher than the state and national averages.

Dr. Ghassan Samara, a head and neck surgeon at Stony Brook University Medical Center on Long Island, said that most thyroid cancers are genetic, but exposure to radiation — like fallout from the Chernobyl accident — puts people at risk for the disease.

The reason is that the thyroid gland absorbs iodine, and radioactive iodine is one of the most common toxic particles in nuclear fallout. Children are especially at risk because their thyroid glands absorb so much iodine, which means they’re taking in much more radiation than an older person, Samara said.

What’s so dangerous about such exposure is that radioactive matter never leaves the body, and thyroid cancer can take 20, 30 or even 40 years to develop, according to Dr. Lijun Weng, the chief of nuclear medicine at Coney Island Hospital. For this reason, hospital officials started asking their physicians to screen patients at risk for thyroid cancer in 2003.

Like the radiation itself, thyroid cancer is often invisible. It can have no symptoms, Weng said, which makes screening so critical. If detected early, thyroid cancer is one the most easily treated cancers — patients can live another 30 or 40 years, Weng said. But if left untreated, Samara said thyroid cancer can kill in several ways: it could grow large enough to restrict breathing or it could spread to the lymph nodes or the lungs. A very curable thyroid cancer could transform to a very aggressive cancer called anaplastic carcinoma, he said.

“It’s not something you should live in fear of, but treat it with respect,” Samara said.

While it’s impossible to state that any individual case of cancer is caused by radiation from Chernobyl, Samara said that the higher-than-average thyroid cancer rates in the Coney Island area show a strong correlation between Chernobyl radiation exposure and the cancer.

According to the New York State Department of Health, the incidence rate for thyroid cancer among men in the Coney Island area is 8.4 per 100,000, 22 percent higher than the New York state average and 50 percent higher than the U.S. average. For women, the thyroid cancer rate is 29.7 per 100,000, 50 percent higher than the state average and 82 percent higher than the U.S. average.

About 100,000 residents of the Coney Island/Brighton Beach area are foreign-born and almost half of those residents are from Russia, the Ukraine, or Belarus, the three regions most affected by the accident at the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine.

As the State Assembly’s first Soviet-born, Russian-speaking member, Alec Brook-Krasny was aware of this thyroid-cancer incidence rate when he was elected to the State Assembly in 2007. Brook-Krasny, a Democrat who represents the 46th District, which includes Coney Island and Brighton Beach, said he started talking to his Assembly colleagues about the Chernobyl-related health issue in his district, and he secured $490,000 in state funding for thyroid-cancer screening.

“They knew that there was a problem, but they never could have imagined that 200,000 people in New York used to live in the area that was affected by Chernobyl,” Brook-Krasny said. The 200,000 figure comes from a study conducted by Dr. Daniel Branovan of the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, Brook-Krasny said. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, 5,000,000 people lived in areas contaminated by Chernobyl radiation.

Brook-Krasny said the state money was mostly spent on two screening machines. The state government no longer funds thyroid-cancer screening in his district, but Brook-Krasny said he is trying to restore funding. He said the program was popular in his district and even farther from home.

“I was visiting the Ukraine and I was speaking on the radio about the program and people were grateful,” Brook-Krasny. “They said it shows a lot about the compassion of the American people.”

Brook-Krasny said he was in Moscow during the Chernobyl accident– a safer 700 miles from Chernobyl — so he doesn’t have memories like Khavin does of avoiding strawberries in the market and being told to close the windows in the rain in the weeks after the accident.

Those immediate concerns quickly passed, Khavin said, but 25 years later he and millions of others still face uncertainty over the accident and its potential effect on their health.

A World Health Organization report released this year said that more than 6,000 thyroid cancers have been diagnosed in children and adolescents who were in the areas most affected by Chernobyl. The report said that increases in thyroid cancer cases are expected for many more years. In a July 12 column in The New York Times, Joe Nocera reported on an increase in thyroid diseases in areas of Poland affected by Chernobyl radiation.

Because thyroid cancer is easily treatable if detected early and fears of more deadly cancers have not materialized, Samara said the health effects of Chernobyl have been less severe than many predicted 25 years ago.

“I don’t think they’ve been as bad as people feared this would be,” Samara said. “Seven thousand cases of thyroid cancer sounds like a lot, but you’re talking about millions of people who were exposed.”

Still, the nature of radiation exposure means that patients who were exposed to Chernobyl radiation need to be vigilant about their health. Coney Island Hospital’s Weng said that even after 25 years thyroid cancers associated with Chernobyl are not showing any sign of slowing.

“Radiation is a lifelong risk,” she said.

That this risk is appearing in Brooklyn is an unusual historical legacy, but Samara said new immigrant populations often will affect the health profile of densely populated areas like Coney Island and Brighton Beach.

“Anytime you have a concentrated immigrant group,” Samara said, “they bring their culture with them, they bring their food with them and sometimes they bring their diseases with them.”

Surf Manor in Coney Island is one of the 28 "impacted" adult homes in New York City that are represented in an ongoing legal battle against the state. (Brian Park/The Brooklyn Ink)

By Brian Park

Coney Island winters can be unforgiving. Gone are the tourists and beachgoers of the summer months. The cold winds, exacerbated in their fury by the Atlantic, bite at exposed skin like an unyielding flurry of tiny whips. The sidewalks are mostly bare.

But there is at least one place in Coney Island where it isn’t hard to find people moving about. Down a barren avenue, past Nathan’s Famous and MCU Park, is where you’ll find Surf Manor. The building’s red brick façade stands out against the general brown, grey and black of its surroundings. Despite its glamorous name, Surf Manor is not some fancy hotel or local hot spot. Surf Manor is an adult home for the psychologically disabled.

Outside its doors, it is common to find a number of residents huddled together against the cold, smoking cigarette after cigarette. With every swing of the door, the smoke penetrates indoors and permeates every level of the four-story building.

“[Smoking] is a routine for a lot the residents here,” said Norman Bloomfield, a resident of Surf Manor. “There aren’t many stimulating activities for the residents to partake in, so if they’re not in the lobby watching television or sitting idly in their rooms, a lot of residents choose to smoke.”

Bloomfield, 63, is one of the nearly 200 residents at Surf Manor, the overwhelming majority of whom suffer from a psychological disability. In New York City, there are 63 adult care facilities in operation, 17 of which can be found in Brooklyn, the second most of any borough, only behind Queens with 23 facilities.

Surf Manor and other like facilities are specifically classified as adult homes—privately owned, for-profit residential facilities whose tenants are largely made up of the psychologically disabled. The medical profiles of New York City’s 4,600 adult home residents span the gamut of diagnoses, but the way in which they find themselves there is often the same.

Bloomfield, who will have lived at Surf Manor for nine years this coming January, was once a college student at New York University’s now defunct Bronx campus. He was and still is a passionate musician, having attended the Julliard Preparatory School. But somewhere along the line, Bloomfield lost his way, and after a three-month stay in the psychiatric ward at Maimonides Medical Center, he was left with no reasonable option except Surf Manor.

“I didn’t have much choice at the time,” said Bloomfield. “The choice is basically going to a shelter and being homeless or going to an adult home.”

Over the years, there has been plenty that’s been said and written of the abject conditions of New York City’s adult homes. The most notable and often cited of these works is the three-part, 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative report by the New York Times’ Clifford Levy entitled “Broken Homes.” Through his own investigation, Levy discovered that adult home residents were not only living in modern day squalor but that state and city regulatory groups were doing little to nothing to address the issues and to reprimand adult home operators.

“Whether it’s something as small and criminal as this dump we’re living in or something as sinister and large as the government, people don’t like the truth being told about them,” said John Glusenkamp, another resident of Surf Manor. “Especially when they’re doing bad things.”

But while improving current conditions in adult homes is still an issue, the controversy has shifted considerably in recent years. Since 2003, New York City’s adult home residents and their advocates have been deadlocked in a legal battle with the state over contested discriminatory practices.

At the heart of the issue is freedom. Adult home residents contend that they have very little choice in where they stay, how they live and whether or not they can advance beyond their lives in adult homes. They argue that the New York State Department of Health (DOH) and the state Office of Mental Health (OMH), the two governing bodies that oversee adult homes, have done little to alleviate their current situations and that they are reluctant to offer alternatives.

A victory for residents like Bloomfield and Glusenkamp would signal the most dramatic shift in care for the psychologically disabled since the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970’s.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

The proliferation of adult homes came on the heels of the deinstitutionalization movement that began in the 1950’s, continued into the 70’s and to a lesser degree, in the 80’s.

The changes began under the Kennedy administration in 1963 when the United States Congress passed the Community Mental Health Act to provide federal funding for community-based mental health centers. Although President Kennedy’s belief—that “an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of care”—is viewed by modern experts as slightly misguided, the government’s growing interest in mental health signaled a shift in public perception of the mentally ill and the large institutions they are often sent to.

“In the 60’s, 70’s and even in the 80’s, if you were diagnosed as schizophrenic, there’s this huge negative perception,” said Glenn Liebman, chief executive officer of the Mental Health Association in New York State. “There’s no way conditions should be like that. There’s no excuse.”

As the poor conditions and ghastly treatment in large institutions came to light, the mentally disabled needed new places to go. Unfortunately, while fewer people with mental disabilities were being sent to psychiatric institutions, there was not yet a uniform system in place for these individuals to live in, receive treatment and rehabilitate.

Soon enough, adult care facilities began to spring up all across the country. These for-profit homes, shrouded by good intentions, were widely accepted by state officials as a relief from the growing number of psychologically disabled persons who were now homeless on the streets or in the prison system.

Unfortunately, adult homes have now become modern day versions of the large institutions America once tried to do away with. Residents are provided room and board but little else. In New York, the DOH and OMH have often promised change but it has come in small, unnoticeable increments.

“There are broad based regulations in place but the reality is, you can regulate forever but you have to change the mindset and direction of both the operators and the residents,” said Liebman. “A lot of residents of the homes have gone straight from a psychiatric center to an adult home. They’ve been run down by the system.”

Adult home residents and their advocates are now fighting for two things: freedom in and from adult homes, and new supported housing that provides a better opportunity to live a normal life. Naturally, adult home operators and state government, motivated by lost income and increased expenses, respectively, have fought against this change.

Trapped In The System

When the psychologically disabled are deemed well enough to leave psychiatric wards or institutions, their choices are often limited to surviving homeless or living in an adult home. Social workers arrange admissions interviews between the psychologically disabled and adult home operators. Once approved, these reluctant tenants sign a lease or an agreement to pay a monthly rent for room and board.

However, most adult home residents do not have jobs. Instead, they receive their income from monthly Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Supplemental Security Disability (SSD) checks. Furthermore, when an individual signs an agreement with an adult home operator, the monthly state-regulated cost for room and board is roughly 87 percent of a resident’s SSI or SSD check. Adult home operators receive the residents’ checks directly from the government and the remaining amount—between $178 to $198 a month or roughly six dollars per day—is dispersed as “personal needs allowances.”

Included in room and board are three daily meals. As such, despite the poor quality of food and their meager allowances, adult home residents are not eligible for government food stamps.

“If residents can’t stomach the food in the dining room, then they have to use up some of their own money to buy [expensive] outside food,” said Bloomfield. “What you have are a lot of residents desperate for money, especially near the end of the month. A few residents will be begging out on the street.”

Residents have the option of filing formal complaints against adult home operators to the DOH but their concerns often fall on deaf ears. Prior to his current stay at Surf Manor, Glusenkamp was a five-and-a-half-year resident at Garden of Eden Home in Bensonhurst. “A very bad joke,” said Glusenkamp. “It was no garden and sure as hell ain’t Eden.”

Said Glusenkamp, “I should have known if you can’t get something corrected in five years of telephone calls and seeing politicians, then it’s like going to Las Vegas and trying to win. The deck of cards is stacked against you. You cannot beat the house.”

Adult homes are not places of treatment and rehabilitation. While residents do receive daily medication, there is not a system in place in New York City’s adult homes to re-acclimate the psychologically disabled back into society. Residents and advocates also say that while they can freely leave adult homes, operators discreetly discourage this through retaliatory threats such as hospitalization.

New York State does have alternative housing options available but until recently, none of those beds were earmarked for the psychologically disabled. These alternative housing options, or government subsidized, supported living apartments, offer far more freedom than do adult homes. While more money is taken out of SSI and SSD checks, residents in supported living apartments own their own rooms, have more personal spending cash and have the opportunity to integrate within their communities.

That is the focal point of the current legal battle between adult home residents and advocates versus the state. Adult home operators do not want to lose their monthly allotments and the state is reluctant to spend more money to place residents in these supported living arrangements. On the other side of the argument, advocates argue that adult homes, like racially segregated schools of the past, are a violation of an individual’s rights and freedoms. Adult home residents just want a chance to make more of their lives, they say.

The Legal Battle

In 2003, Disability Advocates, Inc. (DAI), a legal advocacy group based in Albany, filed a lawsuit on behalf of adult home residents against then-Governor George Pataki, the DOH and the OMH.

The adult home residents represented in the case were from 28 adult care facilities in New York City that are classified as “impacted.” That is, an impacted home is one that houses at least 120 residents of which at least 25 percent suffer from a mental illness.

DAI alleged that the state, DOH and OMH violated the rights of the psychologically disabled as set forth by Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. DAI justified such allegations with the landmark decision Olmstead v. L.C. in which the U.S. Supreme Court stated that the “provisions of the ADA and Rehabilitation Act are violated when a state places people with mental illness in ‘unjustified isolation,’ and that a person with mental illness may sue the state for failing to place him or her ‘in the most integrated setting appropriate to [his or her] needs.’”

In September 2009, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis found in favor of DAI and adult home residents. Later in March 2010, Garaufis offered a remedial plan based on DAI’s proposal that called for the state to develop 1,500 new supported housing units each year for the next three years. But instead of complying with Garaufis’ decision, the state appealed the decision and the case is yet ongoing.

“It’s really about people’s rights under the ADA to not be forced to live with deficient services,” said Cliff Zucker, executive director of DAI. “The state provides services but it insists that residents rely on institutions forever as a condition of getting these services. Supported housing offers a better alternative but the state has denied adult home residents of this.”

From Adult Homes to Supported Living

Following the New York Times’ investigative piece on adult homes, the initial reaction caused the formation of an adult home workgroup whose goal was to improve the lives of adult home residents.

The workgroup’s investigation found that at least 50 percent of all adult home resident were eligible for integrated housing communities, much like the supported units the state is currently fighting against.

“Levy’s work really exposed a lot of wrongdoing on the part of the state and forced them to respond,” said Geoff Lieberman, executive director of the Coalition of Institutionalized Aged and Disabled (CIAD). “But the state and the DOH and the OMH have done very little in response.”

Zucker agrees with the sentiment and said that while Levy’s work was important, its success in influencing change was “limited.” Part of that limited success, however, is a clear indicator that supported housing may be a more viable option for current adult home residents.

One of the small victories to come after the workgroup was the introduction of 60 supported living units for a few adult home residents. Phil Shapiro was one of the fortunate 60 adult home residents who applied and received supported housing. He currently lives in an apartment in Midwood.

“There’s no regimentation,” said Shapiro. “When I take my medication I take it immediately before I retire. Whereas in the home, you would get it between 8:00 and 9:30 and it would make some people woozy for an hour or two.”

“You go shopping and you buy your own food,” added Shapiro. Compared to his former life at Kings Adult Care Center in Brooklyn, Shapiro said that he considers himself “lucky” to be out of an adult home because of the freedom he is offered to live a normal life. Said Shapiro, “I feel great. I’m on my own. I make my own decisions.”