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RECENTLY RELEASED
Coney Island: Lost And Found
by Charles Denson

14 Apr 2003

For most New Yorkers, Coney Island is about nostalgia: family vacations, famous hotdogs, roller coaster rides, and freaky sideshows.

Strip all of that away, author Charles Denson argues in his book Coney Island: Lost and Found, and the neighborhood is defined by urban planning gone awry – a place that has been built, torn or burnt down, and rebuilt again.

"Coney Island never had a blueprint or anything resembling a master plan," writes Denson. "A cheese maker built a giant Ferris wheel; an electrician and dentist devised a famous roller coaster; a real estate man...founded an amusement dynasty."

Part history, part memoir, part picture book, Coney Island: Lost and Found (294 pages, Ten Speed Press, $29.95) tracks the land battles that transformed the sandbar nine miles from Manhattan into a famous resort and then contributed to its deterioration into one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. The book includes over 500 images – historic maps, newspaper clippings, vintage photographs and postcards, the author's own collection of snapshots – and profiles of some of Coney Island's most eccentric residents.

The history of Coney Island begins in 1643, when English settler Lady Deborah Moody – the only woman to found an American colony – took up residence in Gravesend. In 1654, settlers signed an agreement with the chief of the Nyack Indian tribe to purchase the sandbar across the creek, called "Conyne," which is believed to have been derived from the Dutch word for rabbit.

This is when the battle over land began. The title for Coney Island was disputed many times in the following centuries, and was not finally resolved until a New York State Supreme Court ruling in 1920.

The era of the resort began in 1878, when the East River and Coney Island Railroad opened a steam railroad that carried passengers from Atlantic Avenue to the ocean. Soon after, a 275-room hotel – named the Hotel Brighton, after a resort in Brighton, England – was built at the end of the railroad tracks. Amusement rides like a ferris wheel and the "Switchback Railway," the world's first roller coaster, came soon after. By 1880, over a 1 million people a year visited the area.

Coney Island  
The construction of Steeplechase Park in 1897 made Coney Island a family vacation spot. Steeplechase Park featured a sprawling collection of amusement rides, flower gardens, and boat rides along Venetian-like canals. The park contained no bars, only soda fountains.

Over the next 40 years, five major fires destroyed different areas of Coney Island that had to be rebuilt again. The worst was in July 1932, when the boardwalk and four city blocks burned, leaving 1,000 people homeless and causing $5 million in damage.

In the 1930's, city officials like Robert Moses set their sights on reforming Coney Island by turning it into publicly owned land that would resemble Jones Beach. For a time, Moses banned advertising on the boardwalk, prohibited loudspeakers, and set new regulations for beach use. He wanted middle-class housing to replace all amusement rides and sideshows. "There is no use bemoaning the end of the old Coney Island fabled in song and story," Moses once wrote. "The important thing is not to proceed in the mistaken belief that it can be revived."

That sentiment carried on into the late 1960's, when Mayor John Lindsay constructed massive, low-cost public housing in the area. Much of the west end of Coney Island was dismantled in the name of urban renewal.

Coney Island

The Coney Island that most New Yorkers recall revolves around their childhood experiences. Denson (who grew up in a high-rise building in the neighborhood between the 1950's to the 1970's) spends much of the book on his childhood memories as well, including tales of his first ride on the Parachute Jump, hanging out with the owners and operators of the rides, or chasing girls on the boardwalk.

One vivid recollection takes place in the summer of 1966, when the 13-year-old Denson found a way to sneak into the abandoned Steeplechase Park. The author and his friends spent their summer nights walking the tracks of the roller coaster, watching fireworks from a high tower, and evading a night watchman and his dog. Denson became so brave he put his own padlock on a gate and walked around town like he was the owner of the park, a key dangling from his neck.

The next year Steeplechase Park was demolished and some thought it was the end of Coney Island as an amusement park. Crime and arson fires plagued the area for much of the 1970's, but out of that destruction a new artistic community arose. In 1983, the Mermaid Parade began, followed by a revival of sideshows.

Today, the area is once again transforming.

The skeleton of the Parachute Jump ride has earned landmark status and the Stillwell Avenue subway station is undergoing a $250 million renovation. Russian immigrants continue to move into the area. And in 2001, a minor league ballpark opened for the Brooklyn Cyclones, stimulating new construction and bringing a new generation of New Yorkers back to the beach.

And once again, the loss of the "old" Coney Island is being lamented.

"Coney Island is a difficult place to comprehend and define precisely because memories are shaped and distorted by their overpowering visceral experience of the noise, thrills, food, and other sensual pleasures," Denson writes. "A dip in Coney's waters was a baptism, an initiation that lasted a lifetime and created yearning to return to the Coney of one's imagination."

Coney Island

Coney Island
 


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