Here’s an excerpt from the Daily News Op-Ed by Dick Zigun, founder and director of Coney Island USA.

The city’s latest plans to "save" Coney Island – the land of dreams and schemes at the southern tip of Brooklyn – once again threaten to destroy it.

That is why I recently wrote Mayor Bloomberg telling him I plan to resign as a director of the Coney Island Development Corp.
(CIDC) effective Tuesday, when the city will present its latest plan
supposedly designed to transform the area into a year-round attraction.
Plunking 30-story hotels onto land that should offer bumper cars and
other amusements is not the way to save the city’s "working man’s
Riviera."

As everyone in Brooklyn knows, I am the permanently unelected Mayor
of Coney Island and, therefore, a phony politician. As an operator of
the Coney Island USA
museum and sideshow, I am no more than a spokesman and advocate for a
shrinking amusement industry that has persevered despite decades of
municipal neglect and hostility.

Coney Island has been smothered by good intentions emanating from
City Hall, perhaps never more dramatically than in the 1960s when the
city tore down most of the dilapidated structures along Surf and
Mermaid Aves. but never quite got around to the rebuilding part. There
have been so many plans for Coney Island’s future that the paper they
were printed on would reach higher than the horses atop Steeplechase
Park – if Steeplechase had not been torn down as part of one of those
plans.