CONEY
ISLAND
Huddled
masses approaching America at at the turn of the century saw first
not the Statue of Liberty, nor the Brooklyn Bridge, nor even the
breathtaking new skyscrapers, pushing their way up past the church
steeples. What they saw was a wholly different phenomenon: The
City of Fire—the vast new set of wonders sprawled along the sands
on the southern tip of Brooklyn.
Like
the bush Moses encountered on Mount Horeb, Coney Island burned
but was not consumed. It was made up of three great amusement
parks, Steeplechase, and Luna Park, and Dreamland; each of them
adorned with that other new phenomenon of the age, the electric
lightbulb, so that when the sun went down the whole island looked
as if it were strung with frozen pearls of fire, spinning and
plunging and whirling in place.
Even
in during the day, Coney Island circa 1910 was a stunning place.
Luna Park was the most beautiful of the three great parks, though
the other two were not far behind. Just inside its main gate,
with its two crosses plunged into a red heart in some transplanted
bit of Catholic iconography, lay a fairy-tale ramble of minarets
and onion domes, turrets and colonnades, lagoons and trellises.
It was a jumble of every style of architecture the world had ever
seen; a sort of Dr. Seuss world, all painted a glowing orange
and white and gold, and pieced together by one Frederick Thompson,
the moody, alcoholic Frank Lloyd Wright of the American amusement.
An
amusement—there was the holy hell of it. What other city, what
other nation, had ever thrown so much time and money and care
into a public amusement?
Albeit
one that Americans of today would find very disconcerting. The
old Coney Island today would be a field day for personal injury
lawyers. Many of its amusements were designed to help men and
women meet by throwing them together—hard. Others simply reflected
the rather rough and insensitive humor of the day. Visitors climbing
off the Steeplechase ride—a relatively mild jaunt on mechanical
horses, over a mile-and-a-quarter track—were surprised by an obstacle
course that included a dwarf in a harlequin suit, taking a swing
at their legs with a cattle prod—and all for the amusement of
their fellow New Yorkers, watching and laughing from a neighboring
bleacher.
Still
other exhibitions reflected the time's wider sense of entertainment.
There was a hall where patrons could go to watch the country's
first incubator babies struggling for life, and a permanent, year-round
village, filled with dwarves and midgets, and African tribesmen
living in actual grass huts. There were huge stages where one
could go to watch the latest global disasters, hurricanes and
floods, volcanoes and wars.
The
old Coney Island was the product of a time when Americans still
liked their entertainment with a strong undertaste of danger.
A conductor-driven rollercoaster called the Rough Rider once went
right through the retaining walls, killing four passengers. There
was a seemy underside of the boardwalk, including Coney's own,
miniature "Bowery," and a rundown hotel—in the shape of a giant
elephant—that served as a local whorehouse.
But
Coney was, in the end, more than a Sunday outing. It was a place
where immigrants were both literally assimilated in the roiling,
holiday mobs, but also where they went to see the whole pageant
of their lives played out before them. Small wonder that one of
the most popular exhibits was a fake tenement that was set on
fire and put out by fake firemen, every day—for a viewing public
that itself lived in constant fear of such an event.
That
Coney is long gone. Dreamland burned down in 1911, Luna Park in
1946, and they finally closed Steeplechase in 1964. Little more
than a closed parachute jump and a ragged old coaster remain.
But Coney lives on, imitated by world's fairs in Chicago in 1933,
New York in 1939-40 and 1964-65; in the Disney theme park; in
the names of old, deteriorating amusement parks on the outskirts
of cities throughout the United States. None of them, though,
have ever compared to that world of frozen fire, burning along
the sands of Long Island.
American
Greats Edited by Robert A. Wilson & Stanley Marcus
Public Affairs Press, a member of the Perseus Group
