Reviving a Coney Island Ride: Ready, Set, Jump!

[29yrswithaGApass]

As referenced on Screamscape and published in The New York Times:

Reviving a Coney Island Ride: Ready, Set, Jump!

By Jake Mooney

February 29, 2008, 12:45 pm

 

Updated, 3:59 p.m. | Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, never actually rode the Coney Island Parachute Jump — he was afraid, he said in a recent interview — but all those afternoons spent staring up at it and waving to his friends made an impression. Two years ago he collaborated, with the city’s Parks Department and Economic Development Corporation, and the lighting designer Leni Schwendinger, to re-light the dormant Boardwalk ride, promoting it as a beacon to draw eyes toward Coney Island.

 

Mr. Markowitz has been more critical of Ms. Schwendinger’s lights lately, as I wrote in the Dispatches feature in this week’s City section. He also said, in an interview for that story, that the plan to make the ride into a beacon of light came only after he “was advised that making it operational was not a realistic goal.”

 

But talk of reviving the jump, closed since 1968, as a working ride has been hard to quash over the years, and Mr. Markowitz said he is not giving up. He said, in fact, that he recently spoke with someone, a representative of a European company that has offices in the United States, who said the jump could possibly be made to work again. Mr. Markowitz would not name the company, but said it is sending a team to Coney Island “in a few weeks” to inspect the ride and “see whether technology exists to restore it as a parachute jump attraction.”

 

He said he had made clear to the representative that the city and borough cannot pay the company for its inspection.

“What I’m saying,” he added, “is there’s a remote, the remotest chance that it could be made a ride again.”

Today, after an earlier version of this blog post was published, Mr. Markowitz’s office called and agreed to identify the company: Intamin, a Maryland-based firm that works with companies in Switzerland and Germany. Its president, Sandor Kernacs, said Intamin studied the ride for the city 15 years ago, until restoration talk died out and contact broke off. Recently, though, city officials reached out to him anew, and he met in person with a representative of the city’s Coney Island Development Corporation at an amusement park convention in November.

 

Mr. Kernacs said he plans to come to Brooklyn in the second or third week of March to study the ride, free of charge. The result, he said, might be similar to his company’s conclusion last time: that a restoration, bringing the parachute jump up to modern safety standards, is possible, but will cost money. “Probably a few million dollars,” Mr. Karnacs said. “You know, if you wanted to do it nicely and restore everything, that’s probably what you would be talking about.” That kind of work, he added, would be somewhat more expensive than building a new parachute jump from scratch, but would maintain the ride’s landmark character.

 

The trick, he said, should involve very little change to the ride’s outward appearance, but a substantial overhaul of its inner structure. Aside from the years and neglect and exposure to the elements that the parachute jump has suffered, Mr. Kernacs said, there is a lower public tolerance for real danger. “You could not operate a ride today that is something like what was operating in 1920,” he said. “You would be out of business in weeks.”

 

Hopes have been raised before, most notably by Horace Bullard, a developer — and the founder of the Kansas Fried Chicken chain — who planned to build a new Steeplechase Park, resurrecting not just the parachute jump, but also the Steeplechase horse racing ride itself. The plans fell apart after years of negotiations, and Mr. Bullard later sued the city after the Thunderbolt, another famous old ride on his property, was deemed unsound and demolished. A jury in federal court in Manhattan refused to award Mr. Bullard damages in the case, The Daily News reported in 2004.

Mr. Markowitz himself has raised the possibility of a revived Parachute Jump before. In September 2002, as the city started a $5 million restoration of the ride, he compared its structure (and symbolic significance) to the Eiffel Tower and said reopening it would help reclaim the “special energy” of Brooklyn.

 

A spokeswoman for the Economic Development Corporation said, at the time, that the city was discussing the matter with a qualified construction consultant.