Jack Shalom, "The Quiet Truths of 'Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride'"
David Shasha
The Quiet Truths of “Zipper: Coney Island’s Last Wild Ride” (Amy Nicholson, 2012)
By: Jack Shalom
http://www.pbs.org/pov/blog/storydoctor/2013/08/film-anatomy-zipper-amy-nicholson/#.U1j5UlWrpHY
http://www.brooklyndaily.com/stories/2014/19/bn-sitting-vacant-2014-05-09-bk_2014_19.html
Near the end of Amy Nicholson’s documentary film, Zipper: Coney Island’s Last Wild Ride, shown recently on PBS, real estate developer Joe Sitt is shown beaming at the podium during a press conference called by Mayor Bloomberg. The conference was called to announce the sale of some of Sitt’s Coney Island properties to the city, a sale that will allow Coney Island to be open to further development by big real estate interests. Sitt, with a large smile on his face like a good winner, praises the tough negotiating skills of the city’s lawyers—“Sometimes I felt like I was dealing with Luca Brasi,” a reference to the feared hitman immortalized in Coppola’s classic tale of criminality, The Godfather.
Sitt, perhaps better than most, knew the accuracy of the comparison. The love fest between the Bloomberg administration and Sitt was reminiscent of the famous scenes in The Godfather movies where the heads of the crime families get together to talk business. They understand that nothing —not betrayal, not swindles -- is to be taken personally. It’s just business.
And that’s part of the brilliance of Nicholson’s movie. There is nothing so exciting as killings at toll booths or waking up with a horse’s head in someone’s bed. What it depicts in all its banal ordinariness—because we have now come to think of criminality and corruption as ordinary—is the ordinary business of government in partnership with business, stealing land, democracy, and hope from everyday working people in order to enrich the pockets of the Charlie Rose class.
The strategy of the film is deceptively low key. In its examination of a local issue, the film throws light on the macro problems of crony capitalism by focusing on its most mundane day-to-day operations. At the beginning, we are introduced to two long-time Coney Island residents, Eddie and Frank, former amusement park workers, whose careers at the Coney Island amusements have come to an end with the sale of their star attraction, the Zipper. The Zipper is a technological delight. With a minimum of fuss—the proud inventor is shown talking about how two men can put the thing up in two hours—the ride can provide three separate directions of motion, thus assuring the more delicate of us three different opportunities to lose our midday meals. Thousands thronged every year to ride The Zipper, and Eddie and Frank made a good living from thrill seekers, never complaining at the end of the day as they swept up the loose change that had fallen from riders’ pockets.
Once an island inhabited by coneys—the name for the rabbits that inhabited the island, in its heyday at the beginning of the 20th century--Coney Island became a place of pleasure and relaxation for millions. Situated by a wonderful beach, Coney Island was a dreamlike fantasy world for workers seeking escape on their one day off. The history of Coney Island has been extensively documented in film, including the excellent 1991 documentary Coney Island by Ric Burns. But Nicholson’s film covers different territory. She is not so interested in a portrayal of the history of leisure, fantasy, and recreation as much as in an exploration of the process by which the transformation of land use happens under our noses.
To this end, she extensively covers the smiling members of the Bloomberg administration as they plan to “revitalize” and “develop” the Coney Island area. Then-Mayor Bloomberg is quoted as saying that we must use public money in order to “reap the rewards of private investment.” Just who is going to reap these rewards is never stated. It doesn’t need to be stated, however; as the film makes clear, what is done will be done by the wealthy, for the wealthy, by a government that is of the wealthy. While the film seems to focus on the personality of the head of Thor Equities, Joe Sitt, the man who owned (and still owns) much of the property in Coney Island, in truth it is about much more. In its own very quiet way, the movie is a devastating critique of the absence of democracy in our institutions, so absent that when the lone City Councilman Charles Barron from Brooklyn speaks against a re-zoning plan that will give the store away to Sitt—legislation specifically tailored for Sitt’s interests—he doesn’t even pretend to persuade his fellow legislators. He knows they are bought and sold. Throwing up his hands, Barron says to the Council, “I ask you to vote NO, which none of you are going to do.”
And as the camera rolls, we see legislator after legislator voting in favor of Sitt and the re-zoning—a re-zoning that theoretically has nothing to do with the approving legislators’ districts. Why the rush of legislators falling over themselves to approve new land-use regulations in a district that isn’t theirs? While Nicholson’s strategy is not to comment, it becomes clear to viewers that the very purpose of the City Council is to concretize and put into action the wishes of the elite.
If Joe Sitt were a lone man working to improve his fortunes without some political help, he probably would not get very far. It takes the structure of the political and corporate apparatus in the city to make big money. The agenda of the Bloomberg administration—and we can see it in the last few days of that administration with its frantic pushing through of programs to enrich the wealthy of the city—was to “reap the rewards of private investment.” There was not much interest in improving the lives of the majority of New Yorkers who make a living through paid wages. As in the Charlie Rose world, only the elite exist, only the elite’s opinions and wishes matter. Working people are simply inconvenient facts that can be re-zoned or legislated into their pens as needed.
It might be helpful to put Joe Sitt in context. He is a prominent member of the Syrian-Jewish community in New York City, one that got its start in Brooklyn at the turn of the 20th century. The Syrians who came over at that time, many seeking to avoid being drafted into the Ottoman army, were from merchant families who often travelled abroad to seek their fortunes. Some, like my grandfather, came to Delancey Street and peddled wares from pushcarts door-to door. Eventually some moved to Brooklyn, and opened stores that sold children’s wear, handkerchiefs, and other dry goods. Because of its tightly-knit community, its religious devotion, and its business savvy, along with credit given, no questions asked, to fellow countrymen, many of the community became middle–class and even wealthy in a relatively short time.
For a long time, members of the Syrian-Jewish community eschewed politics. Since they were doing very well financially in New York City, particularly in the garment and electronics businesses, the general feeling was that it was better to fly under the radar rather than calling attention to themselves. However, that isolation from the secular politics of the city eventually changed. And it changed, I believe for a few reasons.
First was the fact that many Syrians were importers. From retail shops, there was a natural evolution to the wholesaling of the goods they were selling, and it was natural to seek cheaper inventory from overseas, specifically Japan, the Philippines, and later China and Bangladesh, among other places. It was now impossible to ignore the consequences of trade agreements on their businesses. Tariffs and the like became important business factors and having contacts with politicians who could represent their businesses’ interests became attractive.
Secondly, with the attention on Soviet Jewry and the worldwide effort to pressure the Soviets to let Soviet Jews emigrate, it seemed possible that similar political pressure could be applied to force the Syrian and other Arab countries to allow their Jews to emigrate. Alliances were made with local and national politicians to help effect this emigration. In addition, with a growing emphasis on Sephardic religious education in Sephardic yeshivot, any moves by politicians to provide public funding or tax breaks for the yeshivot and those attending them were greatly appreciated and sought after.
But perhaps the biggest political change was a change that coincided with a generational change. The family garment and electronic businesses which had so long supported fathers, sons, brothers, and uncles, were getting more difficult to sustain. Big players like Walmart and Target demanded greater specificity from their manufacturers, and they commandeered so much of the market that they could dictate prices to the wholesalers, which severely cut into the Syrian profit margins. The choices were to beat ‘em, join ‘em, or get out of the schmatta business altogether. The first alternative was almost impossible—some importers were able to hang on, but many, many more were driven out of business. Some were able to work with the giants and preserve themselves. But the most successful perhaps were the ones who swapped businesses—and one of the most successful of these businesses was real estate.
Real estate was not a large jump for many of the companies who were in retail—some of them already owned a considerable amount of equity in the retail stores they owned. But it was not just an occupational change that was occurring; if we place the changeover around the 1990s, we see that it was not just a practical and philosophical change in business approaches, but it was also a generational change.
For the majority of Syrian businessmen, business meant first and foremost family. Fathers worked hard at their businesses with the expectations that their sons (and later, even some daughters, though this was much less common) would join their businesses. But these sons were different from the previous generation; unlike their fathers who eschewed the Ashkenazi push for higher secular education (a Syrian lawyer or a doctor then was looked on as a prized, but curious and rare phenomenon in the community), this new generation used their parents’ garment money to attend fancy business schools including the NYU Stern School of business as Sitt did, or the Wharton School, as did the even more influential and asset-laden NYC real estate mogul Jeff Sutton. As retail and wholesale became increasingly swallowed up by the big box stores, the Syrians followed the money and re-positioned themselves in the FIRE industries, that is, Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. They were no longer liminal actors carving out their little territory in the shadow of the NYC establishment; instead, in large measure, they became a significant part of the NYC establishment. So much so that when a Joseph Sitt wanted to spur the growth of the land and properties he was holding in an “underperforming” area, he was able to get the eager assistance of the likes of Dominic Recchia, then City Councilperson for Coney island, to take up his cause.
Nicholson presents Recchia in his office and on the floor of the City Council as a smooth operator, saying whatever has to be said, making deals that have nothing to with the betterment of the lives of the people who actually live in Coney Island. But the depiction is not accusatory or inflammatory; it is merely characterized as the humdrum of business as usual, with the collaboration of the smiling hacks on the NYC Planning Board like Amanda Burden who enthusiastically tells an interviewer, “Wouldn’t it be great if Coney Island became the go-to place to have a Bar Mitzvah!” What Nicholson captures is the absolute tone deafness of these people. They are so distant from understanding the needs or wishes of the Coney Island constituency—the people they are supposedly paid to represent--that anything out of their mouths that attempts to speak to constituent needs comes out horrifically and laughably out of place. The wealthy somehow feel compelled to present their case plated by a faux populist patina. Sitt makes a point to tell his interviewer that people like to call him “Joey Coney Island,” and then puts on a Coney Island hat and shows off a “Joey Coney Island” T-Shirt that he had made up. It’s another quiet but hilarious moment which contains within it a longing to get back to the ancestral roots of poor immigrants getting off the boat from Syria, being the guy who grew up playing stoop ball on the front porch and touch football from manhole cover to manhole cover. Like the celebrity who spends thousands for box seats at Yankee Stadium or a Springsteeen concert, Sitt longs to be seen as just a regular guy who happens to be a billionaire. The cognitive dissonance between what his ancestors came with, and what he has accumulated, often at the expense of others, is just too incongruous; he must continue to believe he is on the same plane as the rest of us. Or at least present that to us. Nicholson doesn’t need to beat us over the head with this tale of two cities; for her, it is enough to observe it.
It’s probably impossible to bring a camera to Coney Island and make an uninteresting movie. The colors, the sounds, the thrills, the cotton candy must be like manna to a filmmaker. Nicholson certainly does well in this respect, and the film is visually fun to watch. But, in her micro examination of a small piece of New York City, Nicholson has tapped into some much larger truths. And the most important one is this: simply, the democracy that we have been taught and imagined and hoped for does not exist, at least not in the institutions where we imagine they should be. There is much to be learned from this film. We can take what is happening in Coney Island and see almost exactly the same process playing out in the educational field in NYC. The city and wealthy developers and hedge fund managers have decided that there is money to be made—big money—by privatizing public education. That means setting up a legislative and publicity apparatus to give public school space to private interests. Charter schools are now allowed to use public school space—often crowding out existing schools—without paying a penny of rent. At the same time, the publicity machine claims that it’s all for the children, even as laws are passed that disallow even the slightest city oversight of the charter schools’ finances. At the same time, the new laws allow the charters to bar disabled students and English language learners. Parent and teacher groups are routinely ignored by city administrators and legislators, and the privatizers continue their collaboration to expropriate, as in Coney Island, what was once community property.
As Bill DeBlasio learned very quickly, to give voice to the non-elite can be dangerous. DeBlasio was denounced with ferocious venom everyday in the press for simply wanting to allow public schools to have a right not to be pushed out of their buildings by private charters. To his credit, DeBlasio held fast for a while; but even he could not hold out when the charters did an end run around the mayor and went to Governor Cuomo, who pushed through draconian legislation severely limiting the city’s power to control charters. The message was given and received. As Nicholson shows with regard to Coney Island, there is a purpose for this government apparatus, and it’s to smooth out the road for the wealthy to achieve their purposes. Anything else is foolish idealism to be shot down quickly.
Despite the important political implications of Nicholson’s film, she frames the story of the development of Coney Island as the story of the fate of the Zipper. Her footage over the final credits gives us the surprising denouement of the Zipper’s fate. In framing her film this way, she is pursuing the storyline as any good storyteller would. For a filmmaker, this is an understandable way of telling the story. However, the real ending of the movie comes a little earlier, when we learn what has become of all the wheeling and dealing, the trampling of the people’s will, the money maneuvering: almost nothing. Here is the real denouement—Spoiler alert!-- the land lies largely fallow, waiting for developers and retailers to start building at their price, on their terms. The operators of rides like the Zipper got nothing but unemployment and an empty lot. Sitt’s organization, Thor Equities, which bought the land at 1.7 million dollars an acre, got paid by New York City taxpayers 14 million dollars per acre for some unplanned development in the future.
When you get off the subway at the Coney Island stop, the first thing you see when you get to Surf Avenue is a sign with the bold message, “Thor Equities and Brooklyn welcome you to Coney Island!” If you’d like to understand how such a sign could come to be in New York City, I highly recommend Amy Nicholson’s Zipper: Coney Island’s Last Wild Ride.
Jack Shalom has been an educator for forty years. He is a theatre historian whose papers have appeared in the journals Theater and African American Review.