News of Carol Albert’s statement that Astroland will close for good on Sunday hit around 2PM yesterday. By 5PM our inbox was starting to get statements about the closure, some of them more curious than others. Lynn Kelly, who chairs the Coney Island Development Corp. and is one of the key city players in the outcome sent out a statement saying that “Today’s announcement that Astroland will close after 46 years should be a serious wake-up call to those who have stood back and watched as the fate of Coney Island has been left in limbo without any safeguards for its future. This further underscores the need for the City’s comprehensive rezoning plan as the only hope for preserving the amusement area and bringing the necessary jobs, infrastructure and affordable housing to the neighborhood.” With all due respect to Ms. Kelly, whose hard work in Coney Island we respect, we strongly disagree with the first part of the statement.

The announcement of the closing of Astroland (should it prove to be the last word if developer Joe Sitt is as impervious bad publicity as one might fear) is a wake up all right, but it is of a very different sort: it should serve as a wakeup call to the Bloomberg Administration that their planning and rezoning effort has serious gaps and that Mr. Sitt seems to be addicted to a game of brinkmanship in his negotiating tactics that places the public interest at the very, very bottom of a list of priorities. Frankly, we do not expect Mr. Sitt to behave any differently. He is a developer of commercial properties (or in the words of former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff “a shopping center developer”) who operates in a cutthroat environment. This is why we have viewed his self-proclaimed status as “Joey Coney Island” with healthy skepticism. Thor’s goal is to make money. If it can make money with an amusement park, it will. If it can make even more with storefronts for Nike under the guise of “entertainment retail,” it will do that. It massive parking lots maximize profits, then one will see acres of it. Niceties like the “public good” don’t necessarily enter into the game of Development Russian Roulette in which we have watched him engage in Coney Island for several years. The task of protecting Coney Island so that it doesn’t degenerate further into a depressing agglomeration of school bus parking lots and overgrown, empty land, should fall to the city. The premature death of Astroland would be from a gun fired by Mr. Sitt, but with a weapon supplied by the city itself.

The issue at hand isn’t whether Coney Island should be rezoned or redeveloped (it should with proper protection for a real amusement zone and it should be brought back to life with appropriate kinds of development that will preserve its history and character), but whether the city will protect this long-suffering place from years of possible vacancy and developer blight. Yes, we said years. When can work start in Coney Island? 2010 is an optimistic assessment assuming the credit crisis doesn’t put all the grand redevelopment plans on hold. There is a very real chance that finance problems could delay projects for another 5-10 years. Mr. Sitt, for instance, says he will be build three high-rise hotels on his property. We have a hard time imagining financing for one such speculative venture let alone three right now.

We say all this as a way of saying that responsibility for the the short-term destruction of Coney Island (ie. more depressing emptiness in 2009 and 2010) will fall squarely at the feet of the city officials that haven’t developed a game plan and haven’t leaned hard on the developer to do the right thing. In this, the city has the ultimate weapon: the power to rezone Mr. Sitt’s land and make it infinitely more valuable or to render it useless to him. The last several years have been like watching two wrestlers grab each other in very sensitives places and squeeze as hard as possible. It has been excruciatingly painful to watch and about as inept a display of developer-public negotiations as we have ever witnessed anywhere in the U.S. for such a huge effort. Thu far, however, Mr. Sitt has been winning the squeezing game with the possible exception of the public spanking delivered by former Mr. Doctoroff and the Mayor last November.

We digress, however. We strongly hope, at this point, that the man who calls himself “Joey Coney Island” will behave in a decent and civic-minded fashion and promptly negotiate leases that show his good faith and desire to avoid dealing Coney Island the final death blows. For generations, Coney Island has been a monument to massive public failures and suffered at the hands of series of both public and private villains. Mr. Sitt can go down in local lore as one of the more vile of the Coney villains or as someone who tries to protect Coney Island until he is able to develop it under the city’s new zoning framework.

Astroland is the litmus test, Mr. Sitt. Will you be the scoundrel who delivered a devastating and unnecessary blow to a place beloved by millions of people or will you act in a decent way, leave Astroland in place and operate rides and attractions on all your other properties until redevelopment can move forward?

Everyone is watching.