The wood has a story to tell, of an odyssey that began by the ocean.
When the parks department three years ago started using concrete and synthetic lumber to replace sections of the Coney Island Boardwalk — that symbol of summer, receptacle of dropped ice cream cones and witness to roller coaster romance — the move sparked outrage from preservationists.
Unintentionally, the city had begun an enchanting narrative of reinvention.
Discarded wood from the Coney Island Boardwalk, reclaimed from dumpsters and salvage yards, has spread from the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of the Pacific, emerging in national museums, a Beverly Hills home and a restaurant in West Hollywood. The wood has cropped up, too, closer to its New York roots: a rooftop farm in Long Island City, a backyard picnic table in Brooklyn, a coffee bar in Greenwich Village.
Perhaps the grandest Eliza Doolittle transformation, though, has been in Philadelphia, at the sleek new home for the Barnes Foundation art museum. In Coney Island, the boardwalk once offered the working class a cheap escape from the heat and a glimpse of carnival freaks; at the Barnes, it offers an exclusive entrance to Matisse and Picasso and their brethren belonging to a billion-dollar collection of masterpieces..
In lieu of a plaque, museum officials often walk around and tell patrons the story of the wood. “We get all sorts of comments,” said Andrew Stewart, a museum spokesman. “People ask, ‘Can we have a hot dog on it?’ ”
It seemed only appropriate that at one of the museum’s opening parties last month, cotton candy was served.
Reclaimed lumber has become an increasingly popular design material for the recycling age, especially in the case of tropical hardwoods like ipe, used on Coney Island, which comes mostly from endangered Brazilian rain forests. (Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has directed the city to stop using ipe.)
Also, using salvaged materials contributes to a building’s LEED rating, an environmental distinction that is highly desirable to architects these days.
The parks department says it tries to reuse what it can, but then allows contractors to sell, discard or give away the rest. (The city makes no money on any transactions.) That is how an architectural salvage company in Philadelphia came to haul away 20 trailer loads of Coney Island wood in 2010. It then supplied the Barnes Foundation with about 6,000 feet of flooring — milled in Pennsylvania Amish country — from the thicker support beams beneath the boardwalk.
Scott Lash, a partner at the salvage company, Provenance Mill Works, said using the wood was “a unique opportunity” to use an endangered material and yet feel good about it.
At the Barnes, the wood is discreetly placed in the elevator and staircases, and as a border to the oak floors in the 23 galleries, but is most striking in the Light Court, the museum’s soaring entrance hall. Arranged in a herringbone pattern 28 feet wide and 155 feet long (extending 40 feet onto a terrace), the refashioned boardwalk forms a tapestry of caramel, red and chocolate hues — the original colors revealed by stripping the wood’s familiar gray skin.
Already, though, the floor shows scratches and scuffs from benches being moved and tables arranged for receptions. The staff buffs it regularly, but such an unvarnished look is what the New York-based architects of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien wanted.
“This wood is still living and breathing and acclimatizing,” said William McDowell, senior project executive for the museum.
Green products have seemed synonymous with California, and in Venice, Calif., a rising star chef has embraced the ethos of reclaimed wood. Travis Lett, 33, the chef at Gjelina and Gjelina Take Away there, originally went to Provenance’s yard to purchase Pennsylvania Bluestone with his designer, Sam Marshall.
They saw the wood and were intrigued, especially since Mr. Lett grew up in Morristown, N.J., and recalled going to Coney Island as a child. They had it trucked cross-country, then laid it on the floors, shower and deck of Mr. Lett’s renovated 1,500-square-foot home blocks off the beach.
“Combining these resources from the East Coast and reusing them in this way is very California,” Mr. Lett said. “I love being connected to the source; that’s very much the way I cook.”
The source could not have been any closer for Michael Sarrel, the owner of Ruby’s Bar and Grill, located directly on the Coney Island Boardwalk. For two years, Central Amusement International, the new landlord, threatened to shut down his and the other longtime boardwalk establishments, and only after tense contract negotiations last December did he sign a long-term lease — provided he would renovate the bar.
He knew exactly how he wanted to do that when he saw demolition crews piling the boardwalk planks in dumpsters on Stillwell Avenue and 15th Street, some 100 feet away from his restaurant, where the city was replacing the ipe with less-endangered hardwood, cumaru.
The crews had already thrown out several loads before Mr. Sarrel said he got them to give him 10,000 feet free. But just extracting the beams from the 20-feet-wide joists and taking out all the nails and screws took longer than two weeks. The material, as hard to cut as stone, was a challenge for carpenters who formed tables, walls, the ceiling and the bar itself, to just the right effect. Using the wood ended up costing far more than $10,000, he said.
“We want to keep the place looking old, but looking new,” Mr. Sarrel said. “We want it to look clean, but look dirty.”
Mr. Sarrel had stored the lumber in a nearby flea market lot, but when the market prepared to open this spring, he rushed to get rid of his surplus. Gwen Schantz, the chief operating officer of Brooklyn Grange, an urban farm located on a roof in Long Island City, answered his ad on Craigslist and paid him $500 for 1,500 square feet of wood. Mr. Sarrel posted another ad and gave pieces away as souvenirs.
Ms. Schantz had a 60-foot-by-15-foot deck built for Brooklyn Grange, hauling the wood with the help of Build it Green! NYC, another Brooklyn nonprofit organization that is a cross between Housing Works and Home Depot.
Build it Green took the surplus and sold it for about $2 a foot to another 20 or so people, including furniture designers. Anthony Malat plans to make a desk, maintaining the familiar silver color. “When you get the boards wet, they still smell strongly of the ocean,” he said.
Michael Weinberg, 35, a director of a medical Web site, commissioned a coffee table for his one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, on which now rests a book about the street artist Banksy, Forbes magazine and a copy of “The Hobbit.”
Alan Solomon, an owner of Sawkill Lumber, a Brooklyn-based yard specializing in reclaimed woods, supplied it to high-end designers, who used it for planters on Julian Schnabel’s patio at his Palazzo Chupi in the West Village, and on tables at Think Coffee on 14th Street.
A Brooklyn furniture company, Uhuru, made a line of five Coney Island designs, including a lounger curved like the Cyclone roller coaster that retails for $7,500. It was chosen for next month’s craft show at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington.
Although the preservationists are pleased to see the material finding new life, the issue is “double-sided,” said Todd Dobrin, the founder of Friends of the Boardwalk, a group dedicated to saving the wooden boardwalk.
“It’s frustrating because it shows the quality of the wood is good and strong enough so that if you maintain it properly it would last a lot longer,” Mr. Dobrin said.
But the parks department said that was not the case. “The recycled lumber is not suitable for use as a boardwalk; it cannot withstand the weight or the weather,” said the department’s chief spokeswoman, Vickie Karp.
The department did recycle the wood directly to another park. The McCarren Park pool opened on Thursday after a 30-month renovation with Coney Island wood (milled to reddish brown) on the walls of the corridors, and fitness and changing rooms.
Scott Demel, the project manager for Rogers Marvel, the architect that rebuilt the park, said, “It was an opportunity to use the wood and tell the story about it.”
That story ends where it begins, on a boardwalk that since opening in 1923 has been perpetually reinventing itself. The city has filled the space beneath the planks with sand, and its new plan for some sections is to combine concrete with recycled plastic lumber. But at Ruby’s, in business since 1934, history endures.
“It’s the last place in Coney Island,” Mr. Sarrel said, “where you can still walk under the boardwalk.”
