Charlie Bendit stood atop Coney Island’s ancient Childs Restaurant building, peering out to sea.

“Can you imagine being up on the roof and having a wedding overlooking the ocean? What a wonderful experience,” he said. “In the summertime, you can have part of it outdoors, part of it indoors. You can have an outdoor dancing area, which is what the roof used to be used for.”

Mr. Bendit, co-CEO of Taconic Investment Partners, holds a 49-year lease on the old, roughly 60,000-square-foot stucco-clad structure, built in 1923. A protected city landmark, it has been abandoned for years—just another empty tomb among the many ruins of Brooklyn’s once-vibrant seaside amusement park.

“We’ve been kind of holding off with our plans to redevelop the building,” said Mr. Bendit as he took The Observer on a tour of the run-down, underutilized venue on a recent Saturday night. (As we descended the stairs, the ancient concrete cracked in a few places beneath our feet.)

He eventually hopes to build an indoor catering-and-banquet hall spanning roughly half of the restaurant’s roof, complete with an outdoor balcony and perhaps a larger eatery downstairs.

“We’re basically ready to go,” he said.

It’s the unresolved development struggle down the boardwalk that’s holding everything up.

Last fall, city officials, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, announced a plan to convert Coney Island’s core amusement area into city-owned parkland, after private developer Joe Sitt’s plan to build hotels and condos along the boardwalk met with significant public opposition.

“I think it’s a little premature right now because no one knows what’s going to be in Coney Island until the city passes its zoning resolutions,” Mr. Bendit said of his wait-and-see strategy at the Childs building. “It’s kind of useful to know what the neighborhood’s going to be like.

“In the interim,” he added, “here is a great iconic building on the boardwalk that can be used for other things.”

Downstairs, scores of roller skaters wheeled around a makeshift rink in the center of the former cafeteria.

For that one night, Mr. Bendit had allowed the Childs building to be converted into Lola Staar’s Dreamland Roller Rink, a temporary skating facility dreamed up by local T-shirt merchant and neighborhood activist Dianna Carlin and sponsored by Glamour magazine and fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger’s toiletries division.

Hundreds of skaters turned out. “For a while, we ran out of roller skates,” Ms. Carlin said.

At press time, Mr. Bendit and Ms. Carlin were still discussing a plan to possibly reopen the rink for the rest of the summer. “There’s a lot of issues with the building as far getting it up to code,” she said.

Standing rink-side that night, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz waxed nostalgic. “When I was a boy, [roller-skating] was among the most popular family and teenage gatherings,” he said, noting that skaters otherwise had no rink to roll to in the whole Borough of Kings, following last spring’s shuttering of the Empire Roller Skating Center in Crown Heights.

But the politician would prefer that Ms. Carlin find some other place to permanently resurrect roller-skating in Coney Island. “What I’d love to see is a catering restaurant upstairs,” Mr. Markowitz said, echoing Mr. Bendit’s comments.

He declined to speculate how or when things would shake out with the city.

“As you can see with Atlantic Yards,” Mr. Markowitz said, referring to developer Bruce Ratner’s controversial and repeatedly litigated development in downtown Brooklyn, “nothing moves quickly in this city.”