For Coney Island's Mayor, A Long, Ugly Winter

Since November, I've been working on a long feature for Narratively about Dick Zigun, self-proclaimed "mayor of Coney Island," and his arts group, Coney Island USA. Best known as the man who invented the Mermaid Parade, Zigun is a charismatic, bombastic and occasionally divisive figure whose life's work was mangled by Hurricane Sandy. I was turned on to the story by Ginny Louloudes, of ART/NY, and spent the next few months hanging around the Boardwalk, interviewing artists, and devouring the unbelievably readable Coney Island: Lost And Found.

Want the lede? I'll give it to you for free. The rest of it, well, you can get that for free too.

Dick Zigun was ready for a two-foot flood. In three decades at Coney Island, every hurricane he had seen blew through like a tourist passing the boardwalk on its way up the coast—and he was not afraid of Sandy. Rather than evacuate, he spent the night at home on West Fifteenth Street, a few blocks from the water, his pick-up parked outside in case of emergency. By the time he realized emergency was here, it was too late to run.

“When the flood came, it came fast,” says Zigun. “When I saw water pouring in under the door, over the sandbags, the water was already knee-high in the street.”

Fearing the flood might knock him over, he waded across the road to take shelter in a friend’s second-story apartment. From the second floor, they watched the water—three feet high and rising. Four. Five.

Dick Zigun, the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Coney Island”

When the tide ebbed after midnight, Zigun, a grizzled fifty-nine year-old, went home to grab something he’d forgotten in his hurry: his cat. He found Buddy floating on his mattress, safe and dry, but “a little freaked out.”

“He saved my expensive goose down comforter,” Zigun says. “He had gathered it up around him, so it wasn’t soaking wet, and he was warm. I grabbed the cat, grabbed my prescription medicine, grabbed my iPhone charger—you know, the essentials of life.”

For a moment, Zigun wasn’t thinking about Coney Island USA, the arts organization, sideshow and museum he founded in 1980. Since then, he has thought of nothing else. Long one of the most visible artists in South Brooklyn, the self-proclaimed “mayor of Coney Island” rules from Surf Avenue, where he has turned a ninety-five year-old restaurant building into the artistic heart of the amusement district. But since the storm, where once stood a bar, a theater and an ice cream parlor, nothing remains but “a big fucking mess.”

At 3,700 words, the resultant story is the longest journalism thing I've ever written, and I think it's turned out pretty well. (The second-longest was the time I spent two weeks pretending to know enough about the legal system to cover a very colorful court battle in Long Island. It sneaked onto the cover of the Observer because it happened to run the week the editor in chief got fired. Timing is everything!)

The pictures above don't have anything to do with the story, but I took them a couple of weeks ago, on my last day doing interviews at Coney. The one of the guy with the metal detector makes me so happy, you can't even imagine.

Have I mentioned lately how hungry I am for summer? I've been checking this website so often, it might as well be my homepage.

How The Bushwick Starr Kept The Blood Play Flowing

In searching for the effect that Hurricane Sandy has had on local theaters, I've concentrated on those in the path of the storm—near the coast, or in the part of Manhattan that lost power last week. But the storm had other ways of messing with us. Today I spoke to Noel Allain, co-founder and artistic director of the Bushwick Starr, which was wrapping up a critically lauded run of The Debate Society's Blood Play when Sandy came to town. Cut the L train, and Bushwick becomes an island. Did the Starr's audience bridge the gap?

How have things been at the Starr?

Things are good. The L train is back up now. We had a show Monday and Wednesday the week of the storm, and obviously cancelled the show Monday. When everyone started to see how badly the city was being affected, and that the trains were not going to be back up any time soon, we canceled the show Wednesday, and were afraid that was it for the last week of the show. We were pretty disappointed, obviously, but on Thursday we had a conversation about it and looked at the list of ticketholders and said, Hey! Most of these people live in Brooklyn!

We wrote the list, and asked everyone—if we go ahead with the show, will you come? They said they'd be there, and we had a full house. People walked from Carroll Gardens. It was very heartening, especially after everything that had happened for the past few days, to see this support, this enthusiasm, for the show, for coming to the theater. At that point, I felt, oh—this is filling a need.

When we saw that, we decided to have the show the rest of the weekend, and they were all full. Even without the train, we had a great turnout.

Is most of your audience local to Bushwick? Or do people trek in?

They trek in. We're still working on building an audience in the immediate area. The crowd here is mostly visual art, music, parties. You say, oh, come see a play, and they look at you like, oh, why would I do that? It takes time to get people to show up.

What about your cast and crew? Did they have trouble making it in without the L?

They banded together; they found creative solutions. Some people live in Inwood. Our stage manager Liz is in Long Island, and drives in, so that whole week she stayed with the director of the show in Brooklyn. Everyone was under such duress, their lives were already turned upside down, that making the show happen was a welcome challenge. 

Until recently, I lived in Williamsburg and my girlfriend lived in Bushwick, and I got used to the L train going out for whole weekends at a time. Are you used to dealing with the L train vanishing?

We're used to living in fear. Shutting it down on the weekends—there's so much weekend business on the L train, it's like, are you fucking kidding me? Knock on wood right now, they've changed things up a little bit, probably because of that public outcry, and started doing work weeknights after 11. On a weeknight, people aren't gonna be staying out all night anyway. I hope they keep that up.

Those shuttle buses were part of why I left Williamsburg.

How can they think they can replace the whole L train with one little shuttle bus? Living where I am, the shuttles actually worked, because they would be empty when you got on. But once it got to the Graham stop, to the Lorimer stop, just forget about it. I just started walking. 

Did you get nervous seeing those pictures of the L tunnels completely flooded? 

I thought, oh God. How long is this gonna take? When it started running again, God, I felt like a king! Like, the world is open to me! The last couple weeks, you got, more than ever before, a sense of the delicate ecosystem that a city like New York runs on. It was scary. Hopefully, a little bit of a wake-up call to the people who organize this city.

People organize this city?

Somebody does, right? Somebody call those people!

Trouble At The Kitchen, And A Benefit In Red Hook

In case you hadn't noticed, I have spent the last week trying—in my own clumsy way—to document the effects of Hurricane Sandy on the theaters of downtown New York. What makes doing this hard is that the theaters who are in the most trouble are also the ones who are too busy to talk to reporters—even dashing reporters with sexy offbeat blogs. Coney Island USA, for instance, sustained serious damage, but I haven't been able to get any more information than that. I don't know much about theater in the Rockaways, but I'm sure that what is there is in very bad shape. And The Kitchen, in Chelsea, has posted a press release on their website saying that they are in very dire trouble indeed. Normally I wouldn't just quote from a release, but these are special times and, hey, this isn't a newspaper. It's my blog, dammit.

"Four feet of flooding filled the building's theater and lobby spaces, causing severe damage," sayeth the release. "Initial estimates of our loss are between $400,000 and $500,000, if not above, depending on how much material we are able to salvage for future use."

This is bad news. The Kitchen is a cool space and deserves as much love as you can spare this month. Besides wrecking their fall season, the storm forced them to postpone a November 12th benefit art auction which has now been postponed to November 26th. If you are in the market for some art, consider buying it here.

If art auctions are out of your price range, consider throwing a few dollars at the Red Hook Initiative, which is turning its November 13th Snacky Tunes concert into a benefit. More information available here on this, uh, photo of a flyer.

There are going to be lots of benefits this month, and I'm going to do my best to keep you updated on them. If you hear of anything interesting, or if you represent a theater that needs help, please drop me a line. I'm a man with a lot of spare time on his hands, and I can only take so many showers in a day.

In Queens, Storms Stymie A Parkside Theater

Snow fell on Jamaica last night, and the Black Spectrum Theatre was dark, as it has been ever since Sandy first lapped at the beaches of Long Island. The theater did not flood and its power did not fail, but this local landmark sits on park land, and the one-two punch of hurricane and nor'easter means the parks of Jamaica remain closed. 

"It's snowing, you know. Winds are picking up," said Carl Clay last night. "This cuts right in the middle of our workweek."

Filmmaker, producer and writer, Clay founded the theater in 1970. Originally a traveling troop, the company settled down in 1986, to occupy a purpose-built 325-seat theater in Roy Wilkins Park, not far from the heart of Jamaica. Since its beginning, Black Spectrum has showcased the work of emerging and established black artists, reaching out into the underserved local schools to do so. This is the mission statement of dozens of community-based theaters across New York City, but few such like-minded groups have been successful enough to find a permanent home.

Since Sandy's first approach forced the city to close its parks, Black Spectrum's plum location has become an albatross. The pair of storms have forced more than a week of cancellations—abruptly ending the run of Bubba's Fish Market and upending the planned world premiere of Dumas, which was slated for a four day run that has now been pushed back to February.

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Black Spectrum's parkside home, the morning after the snowstorm.

"While we weren't flooded and no trees fell on our facility," Clay said, "we were hit in in another kind of way, which was just as damaging. With the loss of revenue for these productions that we've put money into and are now unable to recoup right now, it does mess with our cash flow, and our entire schedule."

Like many community-based theaters, a large chunk of Black Spectrum's revenue comes from doing programs in public schools. But ongoing disputes between mayor and teacher's union have held back funds for that kind of programming, forcing the theater to postpone the start of its in-school season to, at the earliest, January. With the loss of that funding, this half of the season was totally dependent on box office revenue that is now not coming in.

"This is literally the beginning of our season, so we're energized, ready to go," Clay said. "It's a little frustrating! We're not defeated or anything like that, but it is damaging."

He and his staff know that things could be much worse. What for some arts groups was a tragedy, to Black Spectrum is a frustration. Although their fall season has been turned upside down, the winds did no damage to the theater's brand new, $100,000 electronic marquee, which is designed to give them visibility beyond the park. The lost revenue from the school programs and the shuttered box office will not cripple the company. After decades in the business, Clay is too cunning to let a storm sink Black Spectrum.

"We're in our 43rd year of operation," he said, "so we know how to prepare. 

A Recipe For The Stranded: Bake, Bake, Worry, Bake

Outside the Magic Futurebox the day after Sandy—desolate but dry. 

Magic Futurebox sits in a warehouse in Sunset Park, half a block from Gowanus Bay and a short walk from some of the worst-flooded areas of Red Hook. During Monday night's hurricane, artistic director Suzan Eraslan sat in her apartment in Harlem, nervously scanning reports that a warehouse in their neighborhood had flooded and caught fire. To cope with the fear that it was their warehouse that had gone underwater, she continued to prepare for an upcoming production that was suddenly in doubt, altering costumes and baking furiously.

"I baked a lot of cookies," she said this weekend. "And yeah, I was nervous. I kept having this horrible feeling that everything was ruined by flooding or looting or that we'd forgotten to shut things down."

The cookies, whose recipe she eventually perfected, were intended to be given out during Bloody Lullabies for Brave Women, an "abortion fairytale" whose five-show run will benefit the New York Abortion Access Fund. Unable to travel from Harlem to Sunset Park, Eraslan and her co-artistic director Kevin Laibson had to wait until Wednesday to learn their theater's fate. 

"We worked as much as possible to keep from freaking out," said Laibson. "I was nervous about what the fallout would be for the show, but I was downright scared about whether we would still have a theater."

The damaged warehouse was not theirs. The Futurebox was safe. Originally intended to run just before the election, Bloody Lullabies has been postponed a week, and will now open on November 7th. Their tech week lost, Laibson and Eraslan will proceed with a "pretty bare-bones production."

"Our lighting designer is still stuck in New Jersey," said Laibson, "and our set designer is still without power and dealing with flood damage, so the director and I are here building the set and wiring some floodlights."

Because the show is a benefit, all the labor has been volunteered, and Laibson is wary of asking his crew to push themselves for unpaid work "until they can do so without incident." But because the storm has forced the shutdown of another of women's health clinics, he's hoping that Bloody Lullabies can draw enough of an audience to make a difference. 

A Week After Sandy, I Feel The City Sprawl

Last week, I walked fifteen minutes to a friend's house in Fort Greene to drink cheap beer and watch bad football. The Titans lost. The Jets lost. In short, it was Sunday.

In a couple hours, I'm going to the same friend's house to drink cheap beer and watch bad football. The Titans will almost certainly lose. The Jets have a bye, which is good news for anyone tired of Mark "Futility" Sanchez. And meanwhile, in Staten Island, the Rockaways, Coney and elsewhere, New Yorkers are cold, hungry and mad for reasons that have nothing to do (I assume) with the Jets. 

It's not original to comment on the uncanny way that the hurricane split the city in half. For most New Yorkers, life is the same as it was last week—although we're saved the headache of charging through the grocery store buying water. For a handful, well, life has turned to shit. And save for rescue workers, utility workers and the increasing stream of volunteers, reporters and disaster area-tourists, there has been little contact between the two.

The hurricane stripped New York of mass transit, gas supplies, power and Internet—it's no surprise that it's failed to bring us together. People can only walk so far, and those who didn't need to brave bus and gas lines couldn't be blamed for staying in their neighborhoods. Neighborhoods may have come together, but the city has begun to seem very large. 

Yesterday, reading this excellent Times story about the horrifying conditions inside public housing,  I was so affected by the first two paragraphs that I asked myself, "Where was this filed from? Did the reporter make it all the way to Coney Island?" I glanced at the dateline—the bit that tells you where the reporter was when he wrote the story—and realized that, of course, it didn't have one. Articles written in New York don't need a dateline, because this is our home court. But suddenly, Coney Island feels as far away as Beirut.

New Yorkers like to identify with their block, with their neighborhood, borough and city. In an idle way, we assume we have something in common with people in the far reaches of Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. Sure, I've never spent much time in any of those places, but I've driven past them in cabs. They looks like suburbs, and I know what suburbs are like. Or they look like any of the dozens of middle and working class neighborhoods that stretch across Brooklyn. I've spent time in those places. I can imagine everywhere else. 

I really have spent time in Coney Island and the Rockaways. Vacation time, but still. I know the streets. I know what trains to take to get there. This storm has underlined how shallow, how arrogant, how stupid it is to think that has given me any kind of useful knowledge. I don't know a thing about life in the Rockaways—whether or not the power is on. That's a depressing thought, though hardly a surprising one, and to cope with it I'm going to keep writing as much as I can about how the storm has affected our city's theaters. I may not know much, but I know how to write about theater, and I know how to watch the Titans lose. It's time to get back to work.

"Why, Hopsie. You ought to be kept in a cage."

My brain's getting a little bit fried from thinking about the hurricane. I'm doing my best to keep tabs on damaged theaters and to learn everything I can about relief efforts—this, I've found, is much easier than actually helping—but sometimes, a boy needs a break. Yesterday, I let myself think a little about Preston Sturges. It was a welcome relief.

From 1940 to 1944, Preston Sturges made eight films, and at least six were great. I didn’t love Christmas In July , and I haven’t seen The Great Moment, a peculiar-sounding dramedy about the invention of anesthesia. But The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story find a perfect balance between madcap and sentiment, and are among the finest comedies of all time. For what it’s worth, he also wrote and directed a propaganda short, the snappily titled “Safeguarding Military Information,” which you can watch for free online if you are deeply, deeply bored.

Born in Chicago, Sturges was raised on both sides of the Atlantic by a flighty society mother whose best friend was Isadora Duncan—the dancer fondly remembered for having her head pulled off by her own scarf. At sixteen, he began working in the arts, managing his stepfather’s theater into near-oblivion while the older man was busying himself with World War I. After a stint in the air force, Sturges bounced around Broadway, finally writing his first two plays in the late twenties. They flopped hard, but his third effort, the speakeasy comedy Strictly Dishonorable did not. He claimed to have written the play in six days—tying God’s record—and it ran for more than two years.

Ahhh. That's better. Keep reading, or turn off New York 1, put on a movie and let your brain shut up for a while.

The Lady Eve Movie Clip - watch all clips http://j.mp/zRetxT click to subscribe http://j.mp/sNDUs5 Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) flirts with Charles (Henry Fonda), giving him some new nicknames. TM & © Universal (2012) Cast: Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck Director: Preston Sturges MOVIECLIPS YouTube Channel: http://j.mp/vqieFG Join our Facebook page: http://j.mp/tb8OMH Follow us on Twitter: http://j.mp/rZzGsm Buy Movie: http://amzn.to/uJ2qei Producer: Buddy G.

To Work A Miracle, Look To The Stars

Here's to you, workers of ConEd.

Scotty was a miracle worker. Everyone in Starfleet knows it. Engines at max capacity, but you need a little more juice? He'll squeeze a little life out of the old girl. Half his staff blown to bits by an explosion? He'll keep the engines humming and oversee triage. Warp core on the fritz, with the Romulans bearing down? It's a twelve hour task, but if you want it today, he'll do it in six. He's the oppositve of every mechanic you've ever met in real life. 

Long after he and Kirk's five year jaunt, Scotty came to visit the Enterprise-D. Now a captain, he takes advantage of his rank to seriously irritate Geordi LaForge—the chief engineer on the modern new ship. But at one point he gives a piece of advice that explains how he was always able to execute the impossible.

Lie.

Advice from Scotty to all engineers

Pad your estimates of how long or how difficult every important task will take. Your captain may need something right now, but if you tell him it will take a month and get it done in an hour, everybody's happy. 

Yesterday, ConEd did the Scotty trick. Knowing that nothing would enrage blacked-out residents more than missing a deadline for power restoration, they offered nothing but vagueness. Through the week, they kept mum about when power might return. By Thursday, they said that downtown Manhattan might be bright again Saturday. By Friday—late tonight, maybe. And then at seven o'clock last night, the lights came on nearly everywhere that had been dark.

The Scotty Trick. They learned from the best.

In Red Hook, Cleaning Becomes An Art

Martha Bowers, executive director of Red Hook's Dance Theatre Etcetera, spent the week knee-deep in muck. She arrived the morning after the hurricane to find that her second-floor offices had avoided flooding—just. The waterline showed that the water had gotten as high as eight feet the night before, leaving a mess of driftwood, garbage and, oddly, olives. The Fairway below her had been obliterated, and by Wednesday, the smell of rotting food was overwhelming. After hours in the mire, she drove home to Clinton HIll, where children were trick-or-treating.

"I've been up to my knees in mud and toxic water all day, and this neighborhood is trick-or-treating!" she said Wednesday by phone. "Life should return to normal, it's just—only a couple of miles away, it's a disaster zone."

Such astonishment was common this week, as those who have worked in the affected areas contend with the city's overwhelming desire to forget and move on. Wednesday was technically Halloween—the holiday-moving Chris Christie has no power in Brooklyn—and Bowers was not the only artistic citizen of Red Hook who spent the holiday impersonating a relief worker. At a restaurant near Bowers' offices, the instructors from Cora Dance scrubbed the kitchen with bleach. At the Waterfront Barge Museum, Lava Dance Company assisted in clean-up, a favor to the couple in charge, whose children have taken Lava dance classes for years.

"All artists are making art by cleaning right now," Bowers said.

Their space secure, their street clear of olives, Dance Theatre's concern is for the schools where they run dance education programs, and who provide most of their funding. "I went to one school today," Bowers said, "and its whole basement was underwater. We work in another school at the Rockaways, and I don't even know if it's there any more.

"Financially for us, this is gonna be really devastating, but already, people are talking about doing benefits."

On Halloween, while the children of Clinton Hill gorged on candy, the restauranteurs of Red Hook organized a massive barbecue, cooking off meat, veg and anything else that might otherwise spoil. Residents who were unable to evacuate ate well that night. If nothing else, the smell of roasting meat provided a welcome change. 

Park Slope's Littlest Looter

As the national guard contains looting on Coney Island, and thousands of police amble across lower Manhattan, making sure the inhabitants of the Chaos Zone don't get too rowdy, a very tiny, very adorable crime wave has swept the hitherto peaceful confines of storm-spared Park Slope.

I was in line at the Associated Supermarket on Fifth Avenue earlier this evening, replenishing my larder after a few days hiding from the rain. (Oh God, how I fear the rain.) A rather cute four year-old stood in front of me, clutching a tiny purse and looking every bit like a woman out running errands. Playing casual, she wandered over to the candy section, fingered a pack of Bubble Tape and then glanced at her mother.

And then came...the crime!

Little Miss Dillinger unzipped her purse, picked up the Bubble Tape, and slipped it in. She lost her cool when the zipper wouldn't close, and was trying to force it shut when Momma noticed.

"Put that back. Come on."

She put it back.

"You little sticky fingers. Come here. God, and you've got all that Halloween candy at home."

"There's no more Halloween candy! There's no more Halloween candy!"

About this time, the little girl started crying. I don't think it won any sympathy from Mom, but she avoided prosecution.