Coney Island

A little over a hundred years ago, Coney Island was known throughout the Western world as the preeminent playground. It was the home of three major amusement parks, each more grand than the next, and the place where New Yorkers of all races and economic classes gathered in the summer to try to beat the heat. But changing times and fire eclipsed the island, which is today a shell of its former self.

In Ric Burns film for The American Experience, I learned that Henry Hudson, in 1609, was the first European to land on a spit of land at the south end of Brooklyn. It was named for the wild rabbits that populated it (I imagine a coney would be a rare sight today). For two hundred years it was a useless island of dunes and brush, but in the early 1800's, a ferry stop meant that some crude concession shacks were started. The western end of the island became known as "Sodom by the Sea," with all sorts o. f wickedness, while the eastern end opened respectable hotels.

It was near the end of the century that George Tilyou started opening amusements, foremost the steeplechase, which had riders on top of mechanical horses that glided over rails. He opened Steeplechase Park, the first of the big parks. That was followed by Luna Park, and then Dreamland.

These parks coincided with two things--one was the increased leisure time for Americans, something that was unheard of for the lower classes just a few decades before, and the other was electricity. Dreamland had a 375-foot tower as its centerpiece, and had 250,000 incandescent light bulbs. The tower could be seen fifty miles into the Atlantic, and disoriented ships. At Luna Park, Topsy, an elephant who killed a man who fed her a lighted cigarette, withstood poison so Thomas Edison came over from New Jersey and helped electrocute the beast, which was put on film.

As the twentieth century began, the island was a major tourist site, and captured the imagination of many. Some of the things invented there were the Coney Island red hot (nicknamed the hot dog because of dubious ingredients) and the roller coaster. There were contortionists, midgets, movies (465 playing simultaneously). People flocked to have themselves thrown off the human roulette wheel, or parachute to the Earth. Famous disasters and battles were recreated, such as a burning building being tended to by fireman, five days a week. Dreamland had a representation of the underworld, called Hellgate, with a grinning devil on top.

Dreamland was destroyed by fire in 1911 (starting ironically in Hellgate) and never rebuilt. A few years later came World War I, and people didn't find watching disasters so fun. The world changed, and so did Coney Island.

Starting in the '20s, Coney Island's attractions became a little more sordid and seedy, with girlie shows and freak shows, featuring people like the bearded lady and JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy. One of the biggest attractions was babies in incubators.

Though the place wasn't as glamorous, people still flocked there, mostly to the beach. The high water mark was July 4, 1947, when 1.3 million people came--a fifth of New York City's population. Robert Moses wanted to wipe out the amusement parks and build a park, perhaps because the island was a magnet for the poorer elements--it became known as "The Poor Man's Riviera."

Luna Park was destroyed by fire in the '40s, and Steeplechase Park hung on until 1964, by which time the amusement business had been completely changed by Walt Disney. Still, there lingered a reason to go--the Cyclone, a large wooden roller coaster, was still there, as were the freaks. Unmentioned in Burns' film was that Steeplechase Park ended up owned by Fred Trump, father of Donald, who tried to build luxury apartments there but was thwarted by City Hall.

The film was made in 1990, so there is no mention of hot dog-eating contests or the Brooklyn Cyclones. I would have liked to know more about the intermingling of the races on the beach, which in 1900 sounds daring. Was there any controversy over this, or was it just a given?

The style of the film is typical of the Burns brothers', with ghostly images of the island in 1990, and the use of still photos and elegiac music. There is lots of film that still exist, though, and there's nothing quite like watching these ancient movies of people enjoying themselves. A family might save for an entire year just for one day at Coney Island, and by god they enjoyed themselves.