SHADOW ON CONEY ISLAND

It is said that when Henry Hudson sailed into the mouth of the Hudson River, he first discovered Coney Island before sighting Mannatus. The stretch of forest, sand and beach along the three islands that constitute todays Coney Island beguiled the English man. Islands so bright, without shadow, opening to a great body of water, had to have been a spiritual place for the Native Americans. Hudson's Rabbit Island was more than that for the Canarsie Indians. Now, joined in the middle by landfill with Sheepshead Bay on one side and Coney Island Creek on the other, the island-ness of Coney is less remembered and more felt, as the impending development of Thor Equities and the Bloomberg administration takes into effect. The vulnerable ecology of Coney Island waterfront includes the families and individuals whose lives were lived cultivating the excess and banality of Coney Island's pleasures, providing New Yorkers their enchantment and forgetting without leaving their city. The rezoning of Coney Island will wipe out these long entrenched individuals and their life stories, unless the city invests in human capital as part of the heritage of Coney Island.