click to watch slideshow

Astroland, Coney Island’s premier amusement park, kicked off its season this year on March 16.

While most of Coney Island’s 20th Century institutions—from amusement parks like Luna Park, Dreamland and Steeplechase to the Thunderbolt roller coaster and Child’s restaurant—are long gone, Astroland keeps kicking over 45 years after Dewey Albert first opened its doors in 1962.

Astroland “has survived the decades of destruction, rebuilding and destruction again,” said a visitor who called himself Byron the Traveler. “It’s survived the test of time through the decades.”

This may, however, be its final season.

Almost no one expected Astroland to re-open this year. In 2006, the Albert family sold the park to a developer, Thor Equities, for $30 million. Thor was not expected to re-open the park this year, but changed its mind—while it settles its zoning battles with the city—to grant Astroland at least a one-year reprieve.

Will Astroland be open again in the years to come?

“Unless there’s an interim plan to establish Astroland here for another three to five years,” said Carol Hill Albert, Astroland’s current lessee and former co-owner, “I don’t see how we can.”

Thor declined to comment on its plans for Astroland.

Click here to watch an audio slideshow that captures opening day.

click to watch a video

The Coney Island boardwalk is long past its glory days, having fallen into a state of disrepair over the last decade or so for a variety of reasons, with boards sticking out or missing altogether. It poses a danger to pedestrians, and in the past two years, at least eight people have suffered injuries while walking down the boardwalk. Anyone who spends the day sitting there “people watching” (or enjoying a beer at Cha-Cha’s) is likely to see at least one person trip. (On my last visit when the weather was still warm, I saw a girl about twelve fall flat on her face.) The most recent accident was written about in the New York Post on Nov. 19.

I’ve produced a short video on the dilapidated boardwalk, which you can watch by clicking on the image above or by clicking here. It features community board district manager Chuck Reichenthal, local resident Phyllis Leventhal (and her mother, Sarah) and goes into how the boardwalk got to be the way it is and what the future may hold for its repair.

Thousands upon thousands gathered on the streets of New York Saturday, despite a few inches of rain, to protest the Iraq War. Protesters gathered on Broadway, from the north end of Union Square up to 23rd Street, for a rally, followed by a march down Broadway and a left on Worth Street to Foley Square, where there was another informal rally.

Click here to see and hear an audio slideshow.

In historically conservative Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a grassroots anti-war group held a Peace Fair two Saturdays ago in the parking lot of the Bay Ridge United Methodist Church. Sponsored by the Bay Ridge Neighbors for Peace, the fair featured tables with literature and talkative staff from several anti-war groups, such as The World Can’t Wait, The Military Project and The International Socialist Organization. Many local activists spoke, and there was live music as well from local residents and a local chapter of the Raging Grannies.

They also had a bake sale!

Click below to get an aural feel of what it was like:

That is, hard-line bloggers need to stop accusing mainstream media of being entirely obsolete, and hard-line reporters need to stop disparaging the journalistic work being done by ordinary people on the world wide web. Both sides need to come to terms with the fact that they both have their roles, each of which would be enhanced by working more cooperatively and with less suspicion/derision of the other side.

Internet journalists have a few roles to play in the journalistic landscape of today; for starters, they have a unique capacity, that even Lemann acknowledges, to provide raw material, sheer information.  To make sense of this may require an especially savvy reader, or it may require a Journalist to put it into context through extra research and alaysis.  (Anyway, as Jarvis challenges, “show me the millions of Technorati links claiming that we [bloggers] will fill your newsrooms.”)  Bloggers also have the capacity to directly engage media in a conversation that previously wasn’t so open.  With the advent and ease of the blog, ordinary citizens can interact with, and challenge, mainstream media (not to mention the government) in a way that was before impossible beyond a letter to the editor, that may or not be read and/or printed; in this way, they have the ability to function as a check on mainstream journalism, and it also gives the ordinary citizen more power to have a role in setting the agenda.  Though Lemann would call me too “media-centric”, these days we have an all too timid press that, in cooperation with the government, is able to determine the national conversation.  We now have the potential for news made by people.

Lemann, however, in the aforelinked-to article, identifies a disparity between the lofty ideals of internet journalism and the actual, often prosaic practice of it.  As Jarvis notes, this is a bit of a strawman, and unfair as dull counterexamples from mainstream media could be conjured up for the dull examples Lemann draws from the net.  But even taking him at face value, Lemann is wrong to use the dreary examples he scrounges up as disparaging, as though by nothing that the ‘net may not yet be functioning to its full potential–the potential for limitless, democratic freedom–that he’s shown it up as a fraud.  He’s merely described the inchoate stages of a nascent movement.

Lemann’s thoughts on internet journalism might best be summed up looking at a page on The Guardian‘s website in which he responds to Jeff Jarvis.  At the bottom it reads, “comments have now been closed on this entry.”