Furious Activists And Merchants Blame Concrete, Plastic For Mountains Of Sand On Coney Boardwalk


by on Apr 30th, 2013

Activists were displeased when the Parks Department decided to replace the wooden boardwalk on Coney Island with a cement and plastic one. Now, six months after Superstorm Sandy battered our shores, the New York Post is reporting that residents and business owners are complaining that sand is accumulating on the new boardwalk.

The barrage of sand upon the historic promenade has been so terrible that the city has been forced to assign extra workers to keep shoveling it back on to the beach. Boardwalk preservationists are blaming the new cement base for all the extra sand.

“With cement, there’s nowhere for the sand to fall through. There’s no doubt the new surfaces are causing the sand to pile up like never before…This is what you get when the city decides to make changes without doing a proper environmental review,” Todd Dobrin, president of the Friends of the Boardwalk and a candidate for City Councilman Domenic Recchia’s seat in the 47th District, told the Post.

Residents, including Maureen Masterson, 32, were also angry. While trying to maneuver her two-year-old daughter’s stroller through obstructive piles of sand, the Bensonhurst mother expressed negativity over the situation.

“This is horrible. It’s like Sandy never left,” Masterson told the Post.

The encroaching sand isn’t just bad for people trying to walk on the boardwalk. As sand accumulates, it starts blowing in people’s faces, which the city has been vigorously trying to prevent by wetting the sand down.

Local business owner Dennis Vourderis, co-owner of Deno’s Wonder Wheel Park, told the Post that the sand has never been worse. It is “even piling up in the amusement district — which still maintains a wooden boardwalk,” he said, blaming the extra sand on Sandy “pushing it closer to the boardwalk and making it ‘finer’ so it blows more freely.”

“This is the worst we’ve seen it,” said Vourderis, who recently put up netting outside Deno’s to block sand from damaging his rides’ motor systems. “We have to shovel all week just to be ready for the weekend.”

For its part, the Parks Department is blaming Mother Nature and isn’t accepting the idea that the new boardwalk has anything to do with all the extra sand.

“Sand will accumulate on a boardwalk without regard to the decking or the foundation,” the Post reported Parks Department spokeswoman Meghan Lalor as saying.

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  • nolastname

    Why am I not surprised?

  • Georgia

    I am not surprised either. I knew this was going to happen. Wasting $$$ on replacemtnts of not even wood, ripping it up again & again now they decided to put the cement. One hand don’t tell the other what they are thinking or doing.

  • womaninred

    The sand has accumulated more on the wood than on the concrete. Go there and check it out. The cause is Sandy, and the fact that sand has been piled up on the beach very close to the boardwalk. Sand vs plastic vs concrete has nothing to do with it.

  • Jack

    SAND CAME WITH SANDY! END OF DISCUSSION!

    • nolastname

      The initial sand was removed. The sand that is now blowing up onto the plasticwalk has no place to go. OPEN DISCUSSION!

  • http://www.facebook.com/phil.rosenthal.562 Phil Rosenthal

    in related news the concrete boardwalk was also just arrested for the assassination of JFK and for being DB Cooper

    • bruceb

      I don’t post here anymore (Disqus hacked back in mid-January or so), but thanks for the laugh on the reference to JFK (and thanks for the education – had to look up DB Cooper).

      I’m going with the theory that the CI concrete is the same concrete that Abraham Zapruder stood on when he filmed the assassination from the famous grassy knoll. Good thing we caught it before the 50-year anniversary.

      Bruce

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=528447725 facebook-528447725

    At least the sand had somewhere to go on a WOODEN boardwalk. Fucking dolts.

    • womeninred

      Refer to my later post.

  • womeninred

    I went back after reading this to Ocean Parkway and boardwalk near where I live. This is where the concrete and the wood meet on the boardwalk. See for yourself where the sand is. The first picture is the concrete, facing east, the second picture is the wood facing west, I am right at the edge. Nolastname, don’t be surprised, and don’t believe everything you read. To the writer of this article I advise the same, not to believe every activist that wants his name in print. As for Todd Dobrin, he is an outright liar, no wonder he is trying to go into politics. I am not saying that wood caused the sand buildup, but it for sure is not concrete that caused it! facebook-528447725, watch name calling, with these pictures, the words come right back at you. By the way, these pictures taken at about 2pm yesterday (30-4-2013)

    • http://www.sheepsheadbites.com/ Ned Berke

      Thank you. After posting our report, which was based on a Post story, we later stumbled across a Brooklyn Eagle report that was more skeptical of the allegations. Here’s what they wrote:

      Dennis Vourderis, co-owner of Wonder Wheel Park, told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that the section of the boardwalk outside of his amusement park is made of wood, not concrete, and that it is still inundated with sand. “It has nothing to do with the concrete.

      “The whole beach has been pushed up closer to the boardwalk by Sandy,” he said. “The wind is blowing out from the south, and sand that had blown onto the streets of Coney Island is also coming onto the boardwalk. The sand is very fine [in texture],” and for this reason is hard to deal with, he said.

      This reporter saw sand piling up on the boardwalk firsthand two weeks after the storm. Almost every section of the boardwalk had piles of sand on top of it or was coated with caked sand.

      http://brooklyneagle.com/articles/summer-approaches-sand-pileups-plague-coney-boardwalk-2013-04-29-200000

  • Mayor Moneybags

    Go run in a marathon and take in a broadway show while I go count my billions and billions of dollars I’ve made over the past 12 years on your backs destroying this place.

    • nolastname

      Bloomin’ idiots….let this piece of shit run rampant.