Coney Island-style ride for Manhattan tower project gets resistance from responsible-development group

A Coney-Island-style ride embedded at the top of a proposed 51-story Theater District hotel is getting some negative G-force from a project-killing development group that says the city Buildings Department should not have approved it.

The top of the planned 1,067-foot supertall — which got the go-ahead from the department last March — will have a 300-foot drop ride like the Zumanjaro: Drop of Doom at Six Flags, once voted the scariest ride in New Jersey.

The Committee for Environmentally Sound Development, which nine years ago beat back Lincoln Center’s tree-killing project at Damrosch Park and disrupted SJP Properties’ 52-story tower at 200 Amsterdam Ave., has come out against the building.

“Coney Island is an amusement park. Midtown is not an amusement park,” the group’s president, Olive Freud, told the Daily News.

But if Mayor Adams gets his way, more of these rides could come to Manhattan.

Mega-developer Extell, which built the 1,005-foot One57 overlooking Central Park and the dizzying 1,550-foot Central Park Tower, pitched the project to the Buildings Department as part of an industry trend and a must-have for New York City.

“Transient hotels have evolved over the past several decades from being places to eat and sleep to centers within which a wide range of activities, including virtually all forms of entertainment, may occur,” real estate lawyer Paul Selver wrote in Extell’s zoning application.

In addition to the drop ride, the skyscraper will have restaurants, bars, meeting rooms, a fitness center, retail space and an observation deck.

The Midtown Zumanjaro would be an “accessory to the hotel” like the other amenities and would therefore be in compliance with the zoning of the area, Extell says.

“This building is compliant with zoning and the Department of Buildings has approved its inclusion of an indoor amusement attraction which is accessory to the hotel,” Extell spokeswoman Anna LaPorte said.

Many hotels in Las Vegas — like the Stratosphere, the LINQ and Circus Circus — offer similar thrill rides for their guests who decide that losing money at slot machines and blackjack tables is not enough of a rush, Selver points out.

The Buildings Department agreed and approved the thrill ride as an “accessory” like an observation deck or a swimming pool.

“It doesn’t violate zoning,” Buildings Department spokesman Andrew Rudansky said, quoting the stated purpose of having the Theater District subzone, which says in part it aims “to preserve, protect and enhance the scale and character of Times Square, the heart of New York City’s entertainment district.”

Under city rules, Rudansky said, the area is “characterized by a unique combination of building scale, large illuminated signs and entertainment and entertainment-related uses.”

Rudansky also pointed out several other amusement park-style attractions in nearby skyscrapers.

One Vanderbilt offers “the Summit,” a glass-floored observation deck that juts out 1,000-plus feet over the city.

“City Climb” at Hudson Yards offers the chance to strap on a harness and climb a staircase outside the skyscraper to a platform where the user can lean out over the pavement 1,000 feet below with nothing by a nylon strap keeping them from falling.

But those attractions are not exactly the same as what’s being built on W. 46th St, said George Janes, an urban planner hired by the Committee for Environmentally Sound Development to assess the development.

Janes said rides like the one planned atop the W. 46th St. hotel could only be included in areas zoned for these types of attractions, Use Group 15, 90% of which is located in Coney Island.

Shoehorning the drop ride as an “accessory” to the 51-story building is an “entirely irrational and a distortion of the plain, unambiguous meaning of the zoning resolution,” Janes wrote in his challenge to the application.

“Respectfully, [the Buildings Department] lacks the discretion to grant that request and the approval should be revoked,” Janes wrote in his challenge to the project.

Even Las Vegas, he said, doesn’t look lightly on including roller coasters in hotels, and the Nevada Legislature passed a zoning change to allow them.

Extell has also pointed to a long-gone Toys “R” Us Ferris wheel in Times Square as a precedent for the drop ride, but Janes says it was always a temporary structure that never applied for or received permanent status.

“I’m not saying if this is right or wrong, I’m just saying that this is against the zoning. If you want this to be legal, change the zoning,” Janes told The News.

That change could be coming soon under an initiative announced last week by Adams.

As part of his “City of Yes for Economic Opportunity” proposal, the City Planning Department is working to “update 1960s-era rules that limit where amusements are allowed, so experiential retail and family-friendly activities can be located closer to where New Yorkers live,” according to a press release.

The Extell project will go before Community Board 5 on Wednesday night, but its approval or disapproval will have little impact on the project.

“It is an as-of-right project and it needs no approval from anyone else. They are allowed to continue until the zoning challenge is resolved,” Janes said.

Freud will continue to watch the project closely, hoping the Buildings Department reverses course, she said.

“I don’t understand how an agency that is supposed to be responsive to the people could approve it,” she said. “Hopefully, the [department] will look it over and if it doesn’t there’s going to be a lawsuit.”