A group of Coney Island gardeners filed a lawsuit against the city Wednesday for razing a 70,000-square-foot garden to make way for an outdoor theater.
The 16-year-old community garden at West 22nd Street in Brooklyn was destroyed in late December to make way for a planned 5,000-seat amphitheater that would take the place of Brooklyn’s former Childs Restaurant. According to the plaintiffs, the site was legally a park, but a consultant for the city told the New York Post that the garden was decommissioned as a park back in 2004.
The City Council approved plans to convert Coney’s empty Childs Restaurant and the adjacent community garden into an outdoor theater in early December, despite critics’ concerns about the use of $50 million in taxpayer funds, and the development’s accompanying traffic and noise. [Brownstoner] — Julie Strickland