The Coney Island land grab, buy back saga continues with the Bloomberg administration looking to purchase 10.5 acres of property in Coney Island…property that Thor Equities owns. Devloper Joe Sitt is said to be “ready to give up” on his plans to make his properties into gigantic casinos, malls, condos, and whatever else he had planned that wouldn’t include amusements. This move by the city may just be able to save Astroland, a park that is basically already in the grave with a couple of shovels of dirt thrown on top of it…but there still is some banging coming from the coffin! NY Post reports that “sources close to the deal are saying the price for the land is in the $200 to $250 million range.” This all comes after the city snached up an acre of Deno’s Wonder Wheel Park in October before a deal with Thor Equities could go through.

Considering that the fear was that Joe Sitt and company would buy up the land, rezone it, and flip it, I have to wonder if this was plan C of sorts for Sitt. Plan A was actually develop the property into something (casinos, malls, etc.); plan B (but the preferred plan) was flip the land to a condo developer after rezoning and then roll in the dough. And then there was plan C; if rezoning never happened then Sitt would just give up on the land and have the city buy it back for a small return. Sure maybe he didn’t get a large sum back but in this economy any sort of return is good! Of course said plan C also involves Joe Sitt eating a nicely presented shit sandwich, but hell, who doesn’t want to see that?

Read the entire article: Astroland Hope-City Eyes Coney Land Buy

Mr. Freeze to Stay Blue

Posted by on November 18, 2008 | 2 comments

Aw, poor Mr. Freeze, he’s so blue and will continue to be that way. No wait, that’s good! Screamscape is reporting that Six Flags St’ Louis’ Mr Freeze will be repainted blue/blue instead of the red track/blue support color scheme that the Six Flags over Texas now sports. It makes sense I guess, I mean the ride is Mr. Freeze and not Mr. Fucking Fire after all. Really, what were they thinking when they repainted Mr. Freeze at SFoT red and blue in the first place? Did someone accidently think ‘Superman’ while chosing colors? The last thing that pops into my head upon seeing the red and blue track of Mr. Freeze…is Mr. Freeze!

Six Flags seems to be on a re-painting kick lately. They’re doing Medusa at GAdv, Superman: Ride of Steel at SFNE, and Mr. Freeze in Texas.

DoD3 Host Switch

Posted by on November 16, 2008 | Add a Comment

For quite some time now the Domain of Death 3 was hosted on a free account at Byethost.com. I’ll admit, for a free host they were pretty good with generous space/bandwidth allotment on their free accounts. However today my account over at Byethost was suspended, probably due to some scripting taking a dump and eating up processing power. To keep my site going, I would have had to hand them some $$ or wait until the month was over for my site’s suspension to lift. Instead I did something that I was meaning to do for a while, I switched to paid hosting…although not on Byethost but rather HostGator.

I just want to give a heads up that my site might be acting up for the next few days while the DNS fully resolves. The upside to the host change is that the site is already notacibly faster and I now have A LOT more space and bandwidth to play around with. After everything gets back to order, I’ll make sure to put the newly acquired space to good use. 😉

Dorney Wasting No Time with Laser

Posted by on November 12, 2008 | Add a Comment

News Plus Notes is reporting that the deconstruction of Dorney Park’s Schwarzkopf manufactured Laser coaster is well underway. Dorney Park sold the Laser to showmen Thomas Meyer and Theo Rosenzweig who will continue to operate the coaster on the German funfair circuit. Considering that the ride was designed as a portable coaster, it really shouldn’t take too long at all to fully tear it down. Laser has been at Dorney since 1986; prior to that it was located at Playcenter São Paulo in Brazil under the name Colossus. You can check out the tear down photos at the News Plus Notes link above.

With the removal of Laser, “Colossus the Fire Dragon” at Lagoon in Utah will become the only remaining Double Loop in North America.

Six Flags Flaunts 3Q Report

Posted by on November 10, 2008 | Add a Comment

A teleconference about Six Flags’ 2008 third quarter performance was held this morning for analysts, media, and Joe six packs who wanted eavesdrop. In the call Mark Shapiro and crew outlined how the company has shown a revenue gain in the 3Q, going from $464.2 million in the 3Q in 2007 to $489.3 million this 3Q; a 5.4% increase. Along with an increase in revenue, the chain has also lowered expenses and rose per guest spending (aka how much money is spent in park by you, the guest.) Shapiro described it as the best year ever for Six Flags adding that the company is on track to be free-cash-flow positive and that “the foundation has been laid for significant long term growth.”

Of course as some people at the GAdv Online forum pointed out, they probably lowered expenses simply by removing flatrides and the Chiller at Great Adventure!

You can read an overview of the report at MSNBC
A webcast of the 46+ minute teleconference can be heard at the Six Flags website.

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