When I first met Marek, his father lived only a couple of short blocks from the beach in Coney Island, a short walk from this iconic building, with which I promptly fell in love. Built in 1923 as Childs Restaurant, it has since seen life as a candy factory and a roller-skating rink, before finally remaining vacant for decades.
Maybe it is because I lived in Venice Beach, California, and Santa Monica before that, which had their heyday in the same period, from the 1880s through the 1920s, that this crumbling old facade caught my fancy, because I could see the possibilities. Venice, after all, although many of the old landmarks are gone, has lovingly restored and maintained those that remain.
But Venice Beach, which is technically part of Los Angeles city, is a much wealthier area overall than is Coney Island, and is blessed with mild weather all year. Coney Island not only deals with harsher winter weather, but was also subject to the ravages of Hurricane Sandy, although luckily damages to the Childs Building were minimal.
As a matter of trivia, the Childs Building also stood in for the "Coney Island Community Center" in the 2002 film "Two Weeks Notice," with Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant.
According to the trivia section of the film's listing on IMDB.com, the film was originally slated to be shot entirely in Toronto, to save on costs, but Sandra Bullock, who produced as well as starred in the film, insisted that it be shot in New York City, as the story was set there.
Evidently, that helped to revitalize the economy of the city, coming so soon after the September 11th attacks, and in appreciation, December 11th, 2002 was designated "Two Weeks Notice Day" by the Mayor of NYC. The Childs Building, featured in the film, was designated a historical landmark in February, 2003, roughly a month following the film's release.
I was pleased to learn a couple of years ago that there was a new project set to restore the building, with plans for small performance venue and restaurant. I was disheartened to later learn that, in the process, the thriving community garden next door was illegally bulldozed, thus thrusting the project into a lawsuit from yet another developer trampling the rights of economically disadvantaged locals. It definitely put a pall over the entire project.
You would think that, as a people, we would have learned better by now. Evidently not.
In any case, the Childs building has now reopened, with five themed restaurants inside, and sits next to the newly completed Ford Amphitheatre. Although we have been back to Brooklyn since it reopened, I have yet to see it in its new glory, and despite the circumstances, I am grateful both that the city granted it landmark status in 2003, and that it is entering a new chapter of its useful life.
I am always glad when we are bright enough to keep and save our landmark buildings. Too often they are not valued until after they are gone.
Some of the sources used for this post:
http://www.heartofconeyisland.com/
https://ny.curbed.com/2017/5/17/15649350/coney-island-childs-restaurant-kitchen-21
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0313737/trivia
All words and images are my own. I took this photograph on a trip with Marek, in September 2011, using my Canon PowerShot SX 30 iS. You can see a section of the Coney Island boardwalk in the foreground.
Interestingly, I didn't catch last night that while I meant for the first category to be #architecturalphotography, I misspelled it, and now Steemit is not allowing me to correct the spelling, which has never happened in the past.
This time, instead of correcting it and updating, it is counting the correction as a sixth tag, and even when I tried deleting the tag and updating with only four tags, it is retaining the incorrect tag.
Any ideas?
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