Coney Island Mall

Shopping mall developer speculates on real estate along the Coney Island Boardwalk, Joey Clams out by the end of summer, Applebee’s to open in its place?

And Proud of It

After two years of “market research, focus groups and on-the-street interviews,”, Bed-Stuy Boosters have settled on a slogan befitting the Brooklyn neighborhood:

Bedford-Stuyvesant will no longer be known as the gritty “Do or Die” section of Brooklyn — from now on, it’s “Bed-Stuy and Proud of It.”

Yes, two years . . .

Ironic Jane Jacobs

Williamsburg hipsters fighting the City Planning Department to preserve the neighborhood’s distinctive character:

Ms. [Eve] Sibley, a 28-year-old painter and bartender, and Ms. [Siri] Wilson, a 31-year-old clothing designer, had been blissfully enmeshed in their vibrant Williamsburg scene of parties, music and art. They assumed that their neighborhood – historically ethnic and currently extremely trendy – would change in ways that generally preserved its polyglot character.

Then something gave them pause. Last fall, they began seeing fliers posted around the neighborhood warning that the waterfront development would threaten the area’s economic mix. In December, they went to a community board meeting where local residents were packed to the rafters, expressing outrage over the plan. “There were old Polish women, Puerto Ricans, Hasidic Jews,” Ms. Sibley recalled. “Everyone who’s been living here for years and makes this neighborhood interesting and diverse.”

But one group conspicuously absent, they noticed, was their own. “We say ‘hipsters,’ ” Ms. Wilson conceded, “even though the terminology makes us feel funny.”

In response, the two women took it upon themselves to act as emissaries to the hipster constituency, and to do so in true hipster fashion. Dubbing themselves the Williamsburg Warriors, they set up a Web site, www.williamsburgwarriors.org, “with the help of this hacker dude I was dating for a second,” Ms. Sibley said.

Irony abounds as life appears to imitate the Onion:

“Siri and I have been partying in this neighborhood for a long time,” Ms. Sibley said one afternoon recently as she tapped the ash from her cigarette. “We know our friends care about the community, but they didn’t know this was going on.”

Ms. Wilson added: “I tell them they’re planning 40-story towers and rezoning that would make 3-story buildings into these 12-story monstrosities. All our favorite coffee shops will become Starbucks, and our cute little North Seventh pharmacy will become Duane Reade.”

For anyone needing more convincing, the women pull up illustrated renderings of the waterfront proposal on the city’s Web site. “Look,” Ms. Wilson said, pointing aghast at one computer animated figure. “Dockers!”

Saturday Night Fever Club Closing

You might be surprised to hear that the Bay Ridge club where the dance scenes in Saturday Night Fever were filmed finally closed last week. Yes, it still existed!

The Times has a piece in Sunday’s City section about how pieces of the club’s famous floor are being auctioned on Ebay:

In front of the closed dance club at 64th Street and Eighth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a red velvet rope lies in a trash bin, an echo of a legendary place and era.

The velvet rope is a remnant of Spectrum, which is being sold and which shut its doors a week ago. It was here in 1977, at a place then called 2001 Odyssey, that a white-suited John Travolta strutted across the lit-from-below dance floor and into cinematic history in “Saturday Night Fever.”

In the nearly three decades since, even as Asian immigration changed the face of a neighborhood that was once heavily Italian and Norwegian, the dance floor remained a constant, welcoming a diverse new generation of gay clubgoers along with those nostalgic for the movie and the disco era.

Jay Rizzo, who has owned the club since it became Spectrum in 1987, said the place was an especially popular stop for Europeans. “I guess it was on a list somewhere of things to see in New York,” he said. “They would take a cab from Manhattan just to see the dance floor, and of course we wouldn’t charge them.”

The wood-and-plexiglass floor was built specifically for the movie and remained essentially unchanged over the years. “The only things that were different were the light bulbs,” Mr. Rizzo said.

I can’t believe no one took the velvet rope as a souvenir! What exactly is the Museum of the City of New York there for if not for detritus like this?

A Post Kind of Story

What starts out as a typical Post kind of story — two Brooklynites arrested for having sex in public, motorcyclists caught doing it with their helmets on, no less! — takes a suspiciously Curb-Your-Enthusiamistic turn later in the report when the perp’s father blames it all on 9/11 (!) and the death of his mother:

A pair of motorcyclists were caught with their pants down — but their helmets still on — along a quiet Brooklyn street.

Robert Wallendorf, 45, and his fiancée Demetra Decolvenaere, 46, were spotted by a cop having sex in the median of a Shore Parkway service road, police said.

They were charged with public lewdness and nudity for the al fresco affair on Monday, near Bay 52nd Street in Gravesend.

Wallendorf was also hit with a single count of drunken driving, to which he pleaded guilty.

According to police sources, shortly after 1 a.m. Monday, Wallendorf and Decolvenaere had parked their motorcycle on the shoulder of Shore Parkway, walked across the road, and began having sex.

Officer Judy Emiliano, on routine patrol, came upon the 1981 Honda motorcycle.

She then saw Wallendorf and Decolvenaere in the median “with their buttocks exposed and their helmets still on, having sex,” said a police source.

The source said the suspects claimed they are engaged to be married. Concluding that the sex was consensual, Emiliano called for backup. Officer Diane McNamara arrived, and arrested them for public sex.

McNamara also smelled alcohol on Wallendorf’s breath, prompting the addi tional drunken-driving charge. He claimed that he was sober when he drove to the median make-out spot, but had “a few beers” once there, the source said.

Wallendorf’s father, Ted, who lives with his son on Marine Parkway, said his son has been drinking excessively since the death of his mother last week.

He added that his son, who works for the Postal Service, helped clean up Ground Zero after 9/11.

“He saw an arm and a leg there,” the father said. “That really got him drinking, but not like now. After his mother died, he got bad.”

“He got the motorcycle to forget his problems, but I don’t like it,” he said.

The man ended up paying a fine, while the public sex charges against the two were later dropped.

And why is it that it always seems to be people in their 40s who are charged with grody public sex acts? The younger and more beautiful are never charged!