Dangerous Coney Island Pier Turned Into Diving Board With No Park Officers in Sight

A new generation of young people are jumping from Steeplechase Pier at Coney Island despite the risk to life and limb. A 14 - year-old boy was injured on June 14th according to law enforcement sources. A Parks Department spokeswoman misrepresented to the Daily News that there were two seasonal workers posted at the pier every day during the summer to prevent this activity. Compounding the problem is that after the lifeguards go home whatever seasonal workers there are needed to clear people out of the water and watch over the closed bays. There is not a single PEP officer assigned to cover any of Brooklyn's beaches.

"When we are there they don't listen to us," said a seasonal worker wearing a Parks Department security shirt. "They know we have no arresting power." (Photos: Geoffrey Croft/NYC Park Advocates) Click on images to enlarge

Divers fly off Steeplechase Pier in Brooklyn. The famed pier made headlines in 1992, when Staten Island brothers John and Virgil Brown jumped off, broke their necks and became paralyzed for life. The brothers sued the city and won more than $100 million - lowered to $25 million on appeal - in one of the largest settlements in the history of the Parks Department. They argued "No diving" signs were not posted at the pier. Although these signs are posted now, there is no one to enforce it. A few people also noted the signs say nothing about jumping.

Brooklyn

Thrill-seeking kids are risking their lives by turning a dangerous Coney Island pier into a diving board - and there's no one there to stop them, according to the New York Daily News.

Steeplechase Pier is attracting daredevils who dive with abandon because budget cuts have slashed the number of Parks Department enforcement agents, union officials say.

"It's fun. It's not a crime," said Billy Rafti, 13, who dives off the pier into the ocean a few times a week and has never been busted.

"They don't care if we jump."

The famed pier made headlines in 1992, when Staten Island brothers John and Virgil Brown jumped off, broke their necks and became paralyzed for life.

The brothers sued the city and won more than $100 million - lowered to $25 million on appeal - by arguing "No diving" signs were not posted at the pier.

"If someone could've shown me what would happen, I wouldn't have done what I did," said Virgil Brown, 47, who now uses a wheelchair.

"You can ignore a sign. ... The city should put a guard on the pier."

Signs without enforcement. "You can ignore a sign. ... The city should put a guard on the pier," said Virgil Brown, now 47, who along with his brother broke his neck and became paralyzed after jumping off the pier.

Today, there are clear signs warning against diving or swimming from the pier, which is about 5 feet above the water.

Still, as the long Fourth of July weekend approached, dozens of kids lined up and took turns doing flips, spins and belly flops into the 20-foot-deep sea.

"It's almost like the Cyclone attraction itself," said Joe Puleo, vice president of Local 983, which represents Parks Enforcement Patrol officers, who can write the jumpers tickets.

"The kids get on line, they're jumping off two, three, four at a time, and they're coming in droves."

Puleo said there are two Parks Enforcement Patrol officers for all of Brooklyn's parks and beaches - down from 10 in 2008.

"The solution is more enforcement, more education, more signage - and the Parks Department is not doing its job adequately monitoring and notifying the public," he said.

A Parks Department spokeswoman said there are two seasonal workers posted at the pier every day during the summer, and they can alert cops.

She also insisted all 38 Parks Department beach employees - including lifeguards, seasonal workers and Parks Enforcement Patrol agents - can warn kids off the pier.

When the Daily News visited the pier last week, there were no workers standing guard.

"It's so fun to do tricks off of it," said Coney Island resident Orlay Peralta, 16. "[City workers] say they're going to stop us, but if you just pass them, they're not."

An NYPD spokeswoman couldn't say how many summonses officers have issued for diving off the pier since the beach opened in May.

"We do assist enforcing the law, but it's the Parks Department's responsibility," she said.

Today's front page Daily News story covering the issue.

Read More:

Kids turn dangerous Coney Island pier into diving board with no park officers in sight

New York Daily News - July 4, 2011 - By Edwin D. Rios and Jake Pearson

Illegal Venders Hit Brooklyn Beaches

An illegal vendor makes his way along Brighton Beach last week.

"It's an open-air supermarket," said Brighton Beach activist Ida Sanoff, who even saw one bold hawker pushing bottles of Smirnoff vodka. "We've got a beach that's full of illegal vendors selling booze and cigarettes - you name it."

There is not a single Parks Enforcement officer assigned to cover any of Brooklyn's three beaches. Despite this fact that did not stop a Parks Department spokeswoman from telling the Daily News there were a total of 28 Parks employees - including PEP officers, assigned to Brooklyn beaches this summer. The Bloomberg administration keeps allowing these misrepresentations from the agency. This was the third misrepresentation from parks officials in recent weeks involving public safety and quality-of -life issues. (Photo: Geoffrey Croft/NYC Park Advocates) Click on image to enlarge.

Brooklyn

Brooklyn's beaches have become open-air markets for illegal vendors peddling everything from cotton candy and ice cream to beer and Jell-O shots, community activists charge, according to the New York Daily News.

Brazen entrepreneurs are pushing their wares - including tie-dyed dresses, homemade jewelry and full cases of cigarettes - with impunity, disturbing beachgoers and ticking off local businesses.

"It's an open-air supermarket," said Brighton Beach activist Ida Sanoff, who even saw one bold hawker pushing bottles of Smirnoff vodka. "We've got a beach that's full of illegal vendors selling booze and cigarettes - you name it."

Brooklyn's three beaches - Coney Island, Manhattan and Brighton - cover nearly 150 acres, giving the traveling salespeople plenty of space to wander.

To make matters worse, there are fewer Parks Department enforcement agents to stop them than ever before. Many of the agents have been cut in recent years due to budget belt-tightening.

Joe Puleo, vice president of Local 983, the union that represents the Park Enforcement Patrol officers who write tickets, said, "We've noticed numerous vendors and shopping carts but officers don't have the visibility.

"When you reduce enforcement, priorities get shifted."

Puleo said there are only two PEP supervisors assigned to Brooklyn's beaches - and they rely on seasonal workers and welfare-to-work employees to report illegal vendors.

"Beer has always been a problem, but now it's out in the open and now they're not even hiding it," he said. "There's nobody there to confiscate it."

A Parks Department spokeswoman said there were a total of 28 Parks employees - including PEP officers, seasonal workers, welfare-to-work and park rangers - assigned to Brooklyn beaches this summer, down eight from last year.

"We go to where the populations are as best we can," she said.

Beachgoers said they rarely, if ever, see green-shirted officers busting chotsky-slingers or booze buyers.

"I've never seen anyone come up to them and say, 'You can't do this here,'" said Bronx resident Christian Lambow, 18, at Coney Island beach last week. "In Central Park, someone gets stopped immediately."

Marine Park resident Robert Raimond, 63, said he enjoys the beach-side service.

"I don't have to get up, put my shoes on, walk all the way back to the Boardwalk and probably pay more for the beer than just sitting in the chair and have it handed to me," he said.

Last week, the Daily News observed at least six vendors pushing everything from mango slices to Coronas. When approached by a reporter, they refused to speak.

Brighton Beach BID executive director Yelena Makhnin said the new illegal vendors flooding the beach were taking dollars away from legitimate businesses.

"Businesses, they say enough is enough; something should be done," said Makhnin.

"A guy who doesn't pay rent, he takes business away from the restaurant who pays rent. There should be some more enforcement."

A police spokeswoman said cops have issued 20 tickets for unlicensed vending in Coney Island since the beach opened in May.

Read More:

Unlicensed vendors flood area beaches, turning city shores into open-air marketplaces

New York Daily News - July 3rd 2011 - By Edwin D. Rios, Erin Durkin and Jake Pearson

State Of Parks - Why Your Parks Look Like This

Why your parks look like this: Because City Hall is slamming them with budget cuts

BY GEOFFREY CROFT

Sunday, July 3rd 2011

This weekend, millions of New Yorkers will be flocking to the city's 1,700 parks and playgrounds, as well as its 14 miles of beaches, to enjoy the holiday weekend.

To their chagrin, they may discover that the city's green spaces are not what they used to be – or, rather, that they are too much like the parks of the bad old days that used to serve as the butt of every late-night talk show host's joke.

Once among the most celebrated public works programs in the nation, our parks have again become dumping grounds, their maintenance and safety buckling under the weight of crippling budget cuts coupled with a lack of accountability from City Hall.

The evidence is right before our eyes. Prospect Park, Mullaly Park and Flushing Meadows look like garbage dumps after big weekends like this one; charcoal smolders under majestic trees. Hypodermic needles dot the lush landscape in Highbridge Park. Glass-strewn, dust-bowl playing fields are the norm. Invasive species strangle many a formerly-scenic green landscape.

But garbage, deteriorating facilities and other nuisances are hardly the only problem.

Within a single 24-hour period in June, three people were stabbed and a woman was raped in park incidents throughout the city. Over the last 14 weeks, there have been 13 shootings, including five deaths, and more than a dozen stabbings and muggings, not to mention numerous sexual assaults and gang activity. Since January, there have been more than 150 arrests on park land, including 98 in Union Square alone. And the long, hot summer has just begun.

The days of the Central Park Jogger, when many thought that it was dangerous to merely enter a park after dusk, seem so far behind. So why is this happening again? One reason is that the Parks Department's Park Enforcement Patrol, whose responsibility is to ensure "the safe use of parks," is severely understaffed. While they don't carry firearms, PEP is the only uniformed law enforcement agency dedicated exclusively to city parks.

There were once 450 PEP officers in the city; today, there are fewer than a hundred. On any given day, there could be as few as two dedicated officers available to patrol an entire borough – if any at all. No wonder, then, that secluded and little-patrolled areas of city parks have become havens for criminal activity.

As for how we got to this deplorable point, the answer is one that we hear all too often in New York: money. Over the last 45 years, no other city agency has lost a greater percentage of its workforce than the Parks Department, and City Hall routinely allocates only one-third of what the Parks Department actually needs. Even in times of billion-dollar surpluses, parks were shortchanged, a clear sign of where City Hall's priorities lie.

Unsurprisingly, recent economic woes have only made the situation worse. While both elected officials and ordinary citizens claim to love parks, they rarely come out to fight unjust cuts or reductions in service. Meanwhile, cuts to other municipal services are met with a swift outcry from concerned New Yorkers.

But maybe because some elected officials unfortunately view parks as a leisure bonus, not a necessity, they will continue to lose out on vital funding. After all, the thinking goes, we need cops, but we can do without bird watching tours.

The budget approved on June 24 allocates just $233 million in tax levy funds for 29,000 acres of public parks. This represents far less than one-half of one percent of the city's $66 billion budget – for an agency responsible for 14% of the city's land.

This budget also anticipates that 665 full-time parks employees will voluntarily resign or retire: Their positions would become seasonal. If they don't agree to resign or retire, the city has threatened layoffs. In other words, further cuts in maintenance and other parks services are to be expected.

Meanwhile, the Parks Department is in dire need of thousands of additional workers. But the public has been told that the funds needed to hire skilled laborers, recreation specialists, gardeners, pruners, foresters, plumbers and maintenance staff are not available for our public parks. That, in short, is why your neighborhood park looks like a barbarian horde just rolled through.

This is shameful, especially since other city services have somehow managed to avoid painful cuts in the latest round of budget negotiations with City Hall. Despite threatening more than 4,000 teacher layoffs, Mayor Bloomberg will not take that drastic (and unpopular) measure. Twenty firehouses won't be closed. Libraries will escape draconian cuts. So will the Police Department.

In fact, a select few parks will continue to do just fine because of private funding through entities like the Central Park Conservancy. But the city's increasing reliance on public-private partnerships has resulted in a vastly inequitable distribution of services. It has quickly become a tale of two cities – the Central Parks and High Lines of this world are more than secure in their finances, while smaller outer borough green spaces that don't have external funding streams suffer. But if parks are an essential service, then the city must fund them equally. To ask for private funding is an unfair solution.

As is, though, it is no secret that a disproportionate number of the most severe park-related issues exist in poor neighborhoods where people of color and low income live – and in some middle-class areas, as well. This is, of course, a great irony, since these communities are most desperate for public space and public services. It is no surprise that a woman was sexually assaulted in Inwood Hill Park earlier this month, the day after a young woman was gunned down on the Riegelmann Boardwalk in Brighton Beach, which is overseen by the Parks Department. Both are in outlying neighborhoods where oversight is low.

But if we are one city, then we need one standard for our parks.

Perhaps the most galling thing about all this is that City Hall is increasingly using our parks as cash cows. The city estimates that it will take in $142.9 million dollars from park revenue this year – while, outrageously, allocating only a fraction of the funds the embattled agency needs.

For one, Mayor Bloomberg's administration quietly pushed through massive recreation fee increases. The city duplicitously tried to claim the increases were designed "to help defray the costs for the Department to maintain fields, courts and recreation centers," even though the money does not go to parks, but to the city's general fund.

Parks are a lot more than the lungs of the city; they are a vital economic engine. It has been proven time and time again that properly maintained parks spur economic investment and greatly impact the quality of life. They provide refuge for roughly 8.1 million residents and more than 47 million visitors alike. There's a reason that property values near well-maintained parks are higher; and why, when those parks sink, the real estate market follows.

If New York is committed to having a comprehensive park system, then that system must be adequately funded. The health and well-being of our great city depend on it. It is quite simple: Safe, properly maintained and well-programmed parks save lives.

But without a greater investment, the public can expect more crime and dirtier lawns. To avoid that, the city must allocate funding that reflects the true needs of the Parks Department. Otherwise, our parks will continue their decline.

Croft is the president of NYC Park Advocates.

Read More:

Why your parks look like this: Because City Hall is slamming them with budget cuts

New York Daily News - July 3, 2011 - By Geoffrey Croft

Coney/Brighton Beach Concrete "Boardwalk" Uproar Continues

Part of the Coney Island Boardwalk, originally built with wood from the Amazon rain forest, is now concrete. More changes are planned, according to a front page story in the New York Times.

Concrete used less than a mile away in a section of Brighton Beach boardwalk which opened a few months ago has already begun to crack. In a "pilot" program the Parks Department has replaced sections of the historic boardwalk in Coney Island and Brighton Beach with concrete instead of with traditional wood or with a sustainable material. The City refuses to allocate proper funds to maintain the wooden boardwalk. (Photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

Brooklyn

The Coney Island Boardwalk, opened in 1923, has inspired songs (The Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk”), plays (Herb Gardner’s “The Goodbye People”) and fiction (Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”). Now, it is inspiring a question of Talmudic complexity: Can a boardwalk be called a boardwalk if it is not made of boards?

Last summer, the city began replacing the wooden boards on two short stretches of boardwalk with concrete strips as a pilot project for a more extensive overhaul of the structure, which extends for two and a half miles along the Brooklyn shoreline.

The change is part of a move away from the tropical hardwoods like ipe 

(pronounced EE-pay) that have long been used by the city for benches, piers and walkways. The woods are tough enough to withstand a fleet of garbage trucks, but their sources in the Amazon rain forest are being depleted. Under pressure from environmental groups like Rainforest Relief, the city has since 2008 been trying to stop using them, and concrete has become the material of choice for boardwalks.

Officials at the Department of Parks and Recreation have promised that the section of several blocks of the Coney Island Boardwalk along the historic amusement area will remain hardwood. But everything else is vulnerable to conversion to concrete.

The officials say other solutions have drawbacks. North American hardwoods are not as sturdy or long-lasting. Concrete, already used for at least one mile of the five-mile Rockaway Beach Boardwalk, so far seems the cheapest, most durable alternative. Concrete, parks officials say, costs $95 a square foot, compared with $127 for hardwood.

Negligence. For decades the City has refused to allocate adequate funds to maintain the historic boardwalk. Each year multiple lawsuits are filed against the city for injuries as a result. The City is using borrowed capital funds to deal with a lack of maintenance funds which has resulted in the use of concrete.

“It is an oxymoron,” Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, conceded in an interview last year when the pilot project was being considered. “But boardwalk has become eponymous, in the way Kleenex is for paper tissue. It is a generic term for an elevated oceanfront walkway, and other communities use concrete.”

That stance has ignited fierce opposition in Brooklyn for more than a year. Now, with the pilot projects complete and the city proceeding to the full-blown replacement, Community Board 13, whose views are only advisory, has spurned a plan for the next stage: five blocks at the Boardwalk’s eastern edge, from Brighton 15th Street to Coney Island Avenue, to be financed with $7.5 million in state money.

About three weeks ago, the community board voted 21 to 7 against the latest compromise: running a 12-foot-wide concrete lane down the middle of the 50-foot-wide boardwalk to accommodate the wear and tear of garbage trucks and police cars. The remaining sides would be built out of planks made of recycled plastic that cost about $110 a square foot and last for years.

That plan was supported by Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, who until then had pushed exclusively for wooden boards. Kevin Jeffrey, the borough parks commissioner, said a decision on how to proceed would be reached in two or three weeks.

Robert Burstein, 56, a schoolteacher who daily takes five-mile runs on the Boardwalk, said people flocked to it because they “want respite from concrete; we have concrete all around us.” A lifelong resident of the Coney Island-Brighton Beach area, he contends that concrete is tough on runners’ knees and other joints and “that’s going to cause injuries, whereas wood is a much more giving surface.”

He and an ad-hoc group have gathered over 1,000 signatures opposing any concrete sections. Mr. Burstein and Rainforest Relief’s director, Tim Keating, argue that other hardwoods, like black locust and white oak, can be used instead of rain-forest wood and that lumber mills could produce the required boards at a reasonable price if the city’s order was large enough.

Mr. Jeffrey said that North American hardwood his agency had tested began to splinter in two or three years. Its use would repeat a current problem on the Boardwalk — aging boards warp and become dangerous, with people tripping or getting splinters. He acknowledged critics’ complaints that boards made of plastic are often slippery, but said they could be given more traction with a grainy coating. They also have the same amount of give as hardwood slats, he said.

The pilot projects replaced wooden boards with concrete along two blocks near Ocean Parkway and four blocks along the wider western end of Coney Island. They used $15 million in federal economic stimulus funds as well as city money.

Preferring the wooden boards, Mr. Burstein said the parks department should relieve the strain on the Boardwalk by putting the heaviest vehicles — garbage trucks — on the beach itself. In his vision, trucks fitted with mechanical arms would ply the beach twice a day, picking up the 450 litter baskets by extending the arms over the Boardwalk’s railing.

In interviews on the Boardwalk on a recent sunny afternoon, natural wood was lauded for its sensual appeal. Lou Powsner, 90, a longtime member of the community board who for decades owned a men’s clothing store on nearby Mermaid Avenue, recalled the smells when he visited the new boardwalk with his parents in the 1920s.

“What I remember is the smell of fresh wood and the salt air, and it was magnificent,” Mr. Powsner said.

He also remembered that the Coney Island Boardwalk — officially known as the Riegelmann Boardwalk for the borough president who built it as a way of offering the public greater access to the beach — withstood storms like Hurricane Donna in 1960 relatively unscathed, while a concrete esplanade in nearby Manhattan Beach was mangled.

But concrete had its advocates, like Mila Ivanova. Ms. Ivanova, a Ukrainian immigrant from Odessa on the Black Sea who also walks the Boardwalk every day, said: “It’s very good — wood — but it’s old. It is shaking. Sometimes nails come up and you fall. Personally, I like everything new.”

Ruby Schultz, a zestful septuagenarian, said she liked the feel of real wooden boards yielding under her feet, a relief from the hard pavement of city streets.

Ms. Schultz, a retired elementary-school teacher, accused the parks department of failing to maintain the wooden boardwalk so people would say: “Enough with the broken boards! Put the concrete down!”

Such suspicions were echoed in a way by Geoffrey Croft, founder of NYC Parks Advocates, a private group, who said the underlying problem was the city did not budget enough money for repairs, finding it politically more palatable to use borrowed capital funds for rebuilding.

“We’re borrowing for maintenance,” Mr. Croft said.

He, too, would like to keep the Boardwalk wood and not concrete.

“A boardwalk is a boardwalk,” he said. “A sidewalk is a sidewalk.”

Read More:

A Fight Over Keeping Boards in the Boardwalk

New York Times - July 1, 2011 - By Joseph Berger

Brighton Beach's New Concrete “Boardwalk” Already Cracking

A Walk In The Park - June 14, 2011

The New York Times front page story on the controversy.