Coney Island 2022

The Phoenix Arises from the Ashes 

Luna Park, Coney Island. Est. 2010.

I've spent a good bit of time learning about Coney Island during its formative period, which was before World War I. Somewhere along the line it occurred to me that I had only the haziest idea of what Coney Island looks like today.

My daughter, who lives in Brooklyn, decided this was a gap that needed to be filled, and so she organized a family expedition to Coney Island.

B&B Carousell.

Saturday, May 21, a beautiful late spring day. We rode the Q train out to the Stillwell Avenue stop, which is about two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean, and as we were leaving the station we noticed large numbers of unusually dressed people coming into the station. It turned out that they were runners who had just completed the Brooklyn Half-Marathon and were now heading home by subway. 

Coney Island beach from the Steeplechase Pier.

The last time I had visited Coney Island I was also running the Brooklyn Half. May 30, 2009. We started in Prospect Park and then ran basically down Ocean Parkway to Coney Island. When I finished I found my family and we walked onto the beach. I took my running shoes off, tied them together, slung them over my shoulder, and walked into the water up to my waist. A good ice bath for the legs and hips.

A man asked me why I had carried my shoes into the water. I responded that I was sure I would need them when I reached the other side of the ocean. 

When my legs were properly chilled, I left the water, and the whole family went to Nathan's on the boardwalk for a hot dog.

Wonder Wheel (1920).

It was crowded at Nathan's on the boardwalk in 2009, but I was unprepared for the crowding at Nathan's in 2022. We scouted around and found Paul's Daughter. Not far away. I enjoyed my hot dog.

At this point we were actually near the end of our visit. We had already walked out onto the Pat Auletta Steeplechase Pier, which was much less crowded than the Riegelmann Boardwalk, and gone for a ride on the famous B&B Carousell. 

We also found a bunch of more modern rides aimed more or less directly at my five-year-old grandson. He and his father even rode a mini roller coaster, which had just the right thrill level.

The rebuilding of the Coney Island amusement zone is a success story. Its historical antecedent, developed largely before World War I, is still present in diminished form. 

For years, the New York City government had seemed intent on erasing the Coney Island amusement zone from the face of the earth. But at some point after Fred Trump, Donald's father, demolished the Steeplechase Park pavilion and destroyed its famous image of Funny Face, there was a change of heart, or at least strategy, and the City started investing in an amusement area that had, to its credit, refused to die.

And so we now have an updated amusement area, bookended on the west with a stadium for the minor-league Brooklyn Cyclones (who arrived in 2001), and on the east side by the New York Aquarium, a refugee from Lower Manhattan and the Bronx Zoo that arrived in 1957. In between the new, there are many pieces of the old. The 1923 Child's Restaurant, for instance, has received landmark status and now continues its journey through history as a live entertainment venue. 

And the City has also put a lot into infrastructure. The 1923 Riegelmann Boardwalk has been extensively renewed and revised in recent years, and the City designated it a scenic landmark in 2018. The Pat Auletta Steeplechase Pier dates from 1907. It collapsed in 1992 and was rebuilt and enhanced. It was damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and was rebuilt and enhanced again.

Other infrastructure work has included the extensive reworking of Coney Island's two main subway stations: Stillwell Avenue and West 8th Street. The latter serves the New York Aquarium and is noted for Vito Acconci's fluid Wavewall of 2005, a nod to the Atlantic Ocean's waves that are just the other side of the Aquarium. 

So what can Asbury Park learn from the new Coney Island? I think this: People still like amusement parks. The Disney parks, and others, have accustomed people to something very different from the old parks. The new model is clean, sanitized, scrubbed of any hint of sexual release. 

Sex had been an element of American amusement parks from the beginning, when Little Egypt (and others) appeared on the Midway of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, and introduced America to belly dancing. (See John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, 1978, pp. 23-26.) 

Parachute Jump (arrived 1941). 

But today's amusement parks have found that they can leave titillation to the Internet. People are still looking for the amusement park's basic offering - a slightly different world, something that takes them out of their daily lives and allows them to dream of a different life.

I'm particularly concerned with the young people. Maybe I'm just a nostalgic grandparent, and it's true I become a child again when I get on a carousel. But I think Asbury Park could do more for children. And I think children who are jaded by their parents' iPads would respond to experiences that are non-virtual - tactile, visceral, fanciful, and even perhaps liberating.

See also Night Lights at Coney Island, Layers at the Beach Front, Jim Crow Was a Failed State.