Coney Island's "End of the Line"

If you're not sick of Coney Island coverage this week (and we, personally, never are), check out the new story in Metropolis Magazine. It offers an interesting perspective on the situation, even though it wrongly predicts "By the time you read this, the battle over the future of Coney Island may be over." The article lays out the difference between organic development and the kind of "themed entertainment" that would be Coney's future:

Of course, the beauty of Coney Island is that it’s been a long time since anyone thought through the experience from threshold to completion. It’s just there: a patchwork creation of myriad small enterprises with an aesthetic dictated by the sky, the ocean, and the simple, colorful attention-getting strategies of ride manu­facturers and sign painters. Although this was where themed entertainment was born more than a century ago, today’s Coney Island has somehow escaped the tyranny of concept. No single designer or developer invented a story for the place. Rather, Coney Island is a compendium of many stories, some happy and some tragic—and most of them better than what passes for narrative in the world of experience design.

It's worth reading in its entirety.