Fleet Week Comes to Coney Island.

Gowanus Lounge spent some time on the Everyperson’s Riveria, aka Coney Island, late in the afternoon on Memorial Day. With a final redevelopment plan due from Thor Equities on July 1, and a push to get approval so that construction on the huge $1 billion hotel-retail-housing complex can start in 2007, this could really be the last year (or next to the last) to get some of the Old Time Coney Feeling. We await Thor’s plans, and hope that Charles Sitt–the moving force behind the redevelopment and a native Brooklynite–gets it right.

Interestingly, the Coney Island Development Corporation, the agency overseeing the redevelopment plans that has been silent so long we were wondering if it had vanished, sputtered back to life today with an announcement of a competition for a community center and 150 units of affordable housing on city-owned land (some distance from the boardwalk redevelopment effort).

Meantime, these photographs of people in Coney offer a little bit of Coney Island flavor in case you were someplace less Brooklyn like Amagansett.

Eating on the Boardwalk.

Watching a Michael Jackson impersonator near Keyspan Park.

Don’t Do This: High Heels on the Boardwalk.

The Memorial Day Crowd.

On the Boardwalk.

What it Looked Like in Late Afternoon.