[NYguy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/re...ides.html?_r=1

Ups and Downs Now Confined Mostly to Rides



By JAKE MOONEY
July 6, 2012

MERMAID AVENUE, the main commercial street through Coney Island’s largest residential section, stretches two dozen blocks west from the faded, raucous amusement park district, past telltale evidence of the area’s varied past. There are brick tenement buildings with storefronts that, in the mid-20th century, housed the bakeries, butcher shops and luncheonettes that were staples of a thriving neighborhood. There are empty lots remaining from Coney Island’s worst years, in the 1960s and ’70s, when much of the neighborhood drifted away or went up in smoke. And there are tidy one-family houses, white with red awnings — block upon block of them, built beginning in the 1980s by a community development organization seeking to fill the emptiness.

Today’s Coney Island, according to residents, officials and real estate brokers, is in yet another phase: safer and more stable than at its low point, populated largely by middle-class homeowners, yet still without the full complement of infrastructure that such a community needs. At the same time residents are holding their breath for a long-planned but recently delayed reinvention of the amusement district, along with construction of thousands of housing units near the boardwalk. The city government approved plans in 2009, though the timetable for those undertakings is unclear.

Eddie Mark, a Department of Transportation sign painter and the chairman of Community Board 13, which represents the area, lives in one of the nearly 1,000 row houses that the Astella Development Corporation built in the 1980s and ’90s. The three-bedroom house, for which Mr. Mark, now 47, paid about $110,000 in 1995, is worth about $300,000, he said. Buyers like himself “were all working-class citizens, and basically wanted the American dream, wanted to own their own house.”