NEW YORK TIMES: The Coney Island Boardwalk, opened in 1923, has inspired songs (The Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk”), plays (Herb Gardner’s “The Goodbye People”) and fiction (Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”). Now, it is inspiring a question of Talmudic complexity: Can a boardwalk be called a boardwalk if it is not made of boards? .
Last summer, the city began replacing the wooden boards on two short stretches of boardwalk with concrete strips as a pilot project for a more extensive overhaul of the structure, which extends for two and a half miles along the Brooklyn shoreline.
The change is part of a move away from the tropical hardwoods like ipe (pronounced EE-pay) that have long been used by the city for benches, piers and walkways. The woods are tough enough to withstand a fleet of garbage trucks, but their sources in the Amazon rain forest are being depleted. Under pressure from environmental groups like Rainforest Relief, the city has since 2008 been trying to stop using them, and concrete has become the material of choice for boardwalks… (more)
EDITOR: Alas, future generations may not know the pleasure of walking and jogging on a flexible wood surface.
