Plastic, Concrete for the Boardwalk?

The Times has a story checking in on the city’s plans to replace sections of the iconic wooden Boardwalk in Coney Island and Brighton Beach: “After a yearlong fight over the city’s proposal to use concrete to replace the wooden boards along stretches of the aging, 2.7-mile Boardwalk, the city’s parks department is offering a compromise of sorts — but wood is not part of the plan. Instead, the department is promising to use a combination of concrete and a type of recycled plastic that looks like wood. They want a 12-foot concrete section for emergency vehicles, with 19-foot-wide sections of the plastic polymer on either side for pedestrians.” The city plans to first install the plastic sections on a 5-block stretch of the Boardwalk in Brighton Beach, and says that investigations into using wood as a replacement just didn’t pencil out. The plastic material is supposed to last 75 years, whereas some of the wood the city looked into using would only last around 8 years. While some preservationists are upset about the plans, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said “economic considerations outweighed the historical importance of the wood. ‘Suggesting that you can only have wooden Boardwalks because that’s what they were originally built of is like saying you should only have cobblestone streets,’ he said.”
Wood May Give Way to Plastic on Coney Island Boardwalk [NY Times]
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