”I can close my eyes and just see it-it was like a fairyland to a child,” says Virginia Nicolosi, reminiscing about summers 50 years past. ”I can still smell the sand. There are certain things you remember as a child:
the bagels with mustard, the merry-go-round, the days on the boardwalk. I remember my dad taking me in the little boats and bumper cars. I remember as a little girl looking up at Luna Park and it looked like an Indian palace.
”I remember,” she says with a sigh, ”the Coney Island that was.”
For those who once knew it as Nicolosi did, Brooklyn`s now-scruffy little fantasy island on the Atlantic Ocean shines brightest, as the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti put it, as ”A Coney Island of the Mind.”
An image harder to conjure, however, is that of the Coney Island that is yet to be, as the quirky urban resort that came to fame in the early 19th Century lurches toward the 21st.
This is very much on the mind of Matthew Kennedy, 87, the lively executive director of the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce. Like Nicolosi, he is Coney Island born and bred. But unlike Nicolosi, whose family departed in the post-World War II rush to the suburbs, Kennedy stayed on. And Coney Island changed.
What once was ”America`s playground” has shrunk to sandbox proportions, its glossy surface long since dulled. Outside Kennedy`s office on Surf Avenue, the amusement area, a five-block strip between Surf Avenue and the boardwalk is dotted with vacant lots and deserted businesses, giving it the gapped look of a derelict`s smile.
Despite a heavy police presence during the summer season and a relatively low crime rate, according to Coney Island`s precinct commander, Capt. John Cronin, the area has an undeservedly bad reputation. On the western end of the boardwalk, the homeless take up perches on benches overlooking the sea. And at night, particularly, Coney Island`s raffish tone takes on a sinister edge that suburbanites, accustomed to the wholesome atmosphere of well-scrubbed theme parks, find alarming.
Still, says Kennedy, 10 million people, many of them children, come to Coney Island every year.
”If you look at it through the eyes of a child, they don`t see the devastation or neglect,” he says. ”They see the glamor and the rides and the shouts and the gleeful attitude of the people.”
The honky-tonk remains
He`s right. Children still shriek here as they swing high above the ground in the Jumbo Jet, and their eyes still shine at winning a stuffed teddy bear for making a basket at the dollar-a-throw arcade games.
The famous Cyclone roller coaster still roars through its 100-second scream of a trip over nine wooden hills. Deno`s Wonder Wheel still spins through its gut-wrenching contortions high above the boardwalk. Nathan`s Famous still sells its renowned hot dogs. Gaudily gorgeous hand-carved horses still prance around the B`B Carousel, and calliope music and happy screams still drift across the sidewalks on Surf Avenue.
In the old days, recalls Kennedy, ”You had the elegant part-the cabarets and all-and then you had the honky-tonk part-the games and all, where they made their money.”
In recent years, aside from the snack-bar-lined, 3-mile boardwalk and its parallel stretch of remarkably broad and pristine beach, only the honky-tonk part is left.
In a sense, Coney Island, once called ”the poor man`s paradise,” is only returning to its roots, or rather, one branch of them in a long and erratic history that has seen more ups and downs than the Cyclone.
A resort rises
Since before the first Dutch colonists came ashore in 1609, Coney Island was something of a warm-weather resort, serving as the summer campground of the Canarsie and Nyack Indians. They called the peninsula, which merits island status only by the grace of a tiny creek separating it from the rest of Brooklyn, Narriockh.
The Dutch, who bought it from the Indians in 1654, dubbed it Conye Eylant in honor of the conies, or rabbits, that populated it. The name eventually was Anglicized into Coney Island.
Coney Island began its rise as an ocean resort in the 1820s, when the first of what would be many hotels was built on the island. For the next 50 years, it remained a preserve of the wealthy, since the trip, by boat or steamer from Manhattan, was too expensive for most people. Its western end became known as a hangout for gamblers, prostitutes and nefarious types in general.
In the last decades of the 19th Century, the introduction of group excursion fares made Coney Island more accessible to the working classes, whose factories, unions and church groups sponsored day trips to the beach. When the subway system finally reached Coney Island in 1920, the masses really poured in.
”It was a regular family thing. We`d pack up the food and take the train out there. We went to cool off and have fun,” recalls Sara Silverman, who made the trip as a child more than 70 years ago. And as a teenager, she says, ”you could meet romance on the boardwalk. Now the kids go to the mall and hang around. Then, you`d go to Coney Island and walk on the boardwalk.”
Coney Island became ”The Nickel Empire,” so dubbed for the 5-cent subway fare that could open its marvels to any New Yorker.
And there were marvels to be seen.
The glory days
Born in Coney Island in 1904, Kennedy grew up witnessing the resort`s most fabulous years, when Coney Island was the most famous amusement park in the world and a mythical place synonymous with ”F-U-N,” as photographs of billboards of the period, displayed at the Brooklyn Historical Society, attest.
These were the glory days of the New Coney, as it was called by its turn- of-the-century promoters, eager to dispel the Old Coney`s reputation for gambling, prostitution and violence. To that end, they built sensational theme parks, packed them with wonders and oddities, and enclosed them to keep troublemakers out and families safely inside.
In 1897, George Tilyou had erected the spectacular Steeplechase Park, named for its jostling ride on life-size mechanical horses. Fred Thompson and Skip Dundy followed with Luna Park in 1903, a fantasyland of onion domes, Japanese tea gardens and minarets all lit up by electric lights. Not to be outdone, Dreamland Park, opened by William Reynolds in 1904, boasted a court of fountains.
”This is what was so wonderful about Coney Island: that grown men got to take their wildest dreams and put them down on a large plot of land,” says Barbara Caldwell of the Brooklyn Historical Society.
In the process, entertainment and food history were made in Coney Island as well. In 1874, a German immigrant named Charles Feltman invented the hot dog there. Ten years later, the world`s first roller coaster opened on Coney Island, built by LaMarcus Thompson, the inventor of seamless hosiery.
By 1900 Brooklyn had become the horse-racing capital of America, with Coney Island at its epicenter. The post-Civil War economic boom had encouraged investors to run rail lines and steamboats out to Coney Island. Eventually, three racetracks there drew the rich and famous of the day-such as the high-rolling ”Diamond” Jim Brady and actress Lillian Russell-and elegant waterfront hotels, vast Victorian confections with pennanted turrets and broad verandas, thrived on them.
It was a heady time, says Kennedy, who recalls seeing bandmaster and composer John Phillip Sousa conducting in the bandstand on the lawn of the posh Brighton Beach Hotel.
Coney Island continued to draw the famous and soon-to-be-famous. ”A lot of them got their start here,” says Kennedy. ”Cary Grant used to be a stiltwalker, carrying a sandwich board for Steeplechase Park. We used to chase him around-when you`re 14, you like to trip a guy on stilts,” he says, laughing.
”Clara Bow, the `It Girl,` she used to slice rolls for Nathan`s. Al Capone was a bouncer in the College Inn.” Eddie Cantor, a singing waiter at the time, and Jimmy Durante, a cabaret accompanist, urged Nathan Handwerker to go into business on his own in 1916 and compete with Feltman`s by selling hot dogs for a nickel instead of a dime.
Feltman`s eventually closed, but Nathan`s Famous survives as a $60 million business. Nathan`s charges $1.85 for its hot dogs these days, but it still sells more than 2 million of them a year in the original stand at the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues.
”The greatest thing down here were the tearjerkers,” Kennedy says of the Cecil B. DeMille-size re-creations staged of historic events, such as
”The Last Days of Pompeii,” and ”The Storming of the Bastille.” ”They did the Johnstown Flood,” he remembers, referring to the devastating flood that hit that Pennsylvania town in 1899, ”and it was so successful that they did the Galveston flood.”
And, of course, there were the sideshows.
”We had dwarfs that were 32 inches high. We had a fat lady who was 600 pounds. We had a fella with three legs-one of them was a growth,” Kennedy recalls with a laugh, ”but he could kick a football with it.”
Most peculiar of all, perhaps, was the display of premature babies at Luna Park, the bizarre, but ultimately benevolent, idea of Dr. Martin Couney. For 40 years, he presented his tiny infants in incubators and used the admission fee to finance their care.
The parks celebrated the miracles of industry and brought them to their patrons. Rides mimicked automobiles when few people had one of their own; TV sets were displayed while they were still a newfangled notion.
The spectacle vanishes
It was all great spectacle, but it all vanished. Thanks to non-existent building codes, Dreamland burned down in 1911. So did Luna Park in 1944, replaced by a low-income housing project. Steeplechase Park closed its gates in 1964. All of Coney Island`s once-lavish hotels and gracious bathhouse pavilions have also disappeared.
The hotel business quickly faded after racetrack gambling was outlawed in 1910 and never came back. The bathhouses hung on until World War II, when, says Kennedy, ”Their demise had to do with the development of synthetics.”
Once sodden and sandy, the heavy, dark cotton and wool bathing costumes that were popular until the end of the 1940s were a misery to their owners, taking hours to dry. The bathhouses, many of them spacious and elaborate, flourished until World War II as places where people could rent lockers and swimsuits and change their clothes, says Kennedy, who worked boyhood summers in the bathhouses, wringing out wet bathing suits. Quick-drying synthetics evaporated the need for bathhouses.
The post-war years also saw the exodus of the middle class to the suburbs, a further drain on the island`s patronage. By 1961, the New York Mirror wrote, ”This is Coney Island-tired, worn, tawdry, but a fairyland to those who follow the sun by subway.”
Thirty years later, those words are still true, but the place desperately needs a fresh sprinkling of fairy dust.
”They could change some of the rides that have been here for a long time and bring in some up-to-date rides, you know, like they have at Great Adventure,” a New Jersey theme park, suggests Michelle Harris, a 21-year-old Brooklynite, sipping a soda in the shadow of the Cyclone.
Indeed, the Cyclone, one of the last wooden roller coasters and designated a national historic landmark last June, is 64 years old. Deno`s Wonder Wheel is 71.
”All it needs is a facelift,” says Mae Timpano, who lived for more than 20 years under Coney Island`s now-defunct Thunderbolt roller coaster in a house immortalized by Woody Allen in his film ”Annie Hall.” The house burned down last May.
$350 million facelift
Horace Bullard, Harlem-born founder of the Kansas Fried Chicken chain, has just such a facelift in mind. His Coney Island Resorts firm has come up with a $350 million plan to bring back Steeplechase Park, complete with its 250-foot Parachute Jump, a New York City historic landmark.
Since 1989, Bullard has held the rights to develop the site, much of it now owned by the city, but those rights expire in November. He is still short of financing, but he says he is hopeful. To let Coney Island continue to deteriorate, he says, ”would be a crime” comparable to letting the Eiffel Tower disappear ”because it`s old, rusted and we don`t want to put any money into it.”
If Bullard`s plan is realized, ”That would mean, with the snap of a finger, a magical transformation that might even help us overshadow Disneyland again,” says Dick Zigun, proprietor of Coney Island`s Sideshows by the Seashore.
But Coney Island was Coney Island before there ever was a Disneyland.
”Clean it up a little,” says Mae Timpano, ”and Coney Island will be Coney Island again.”
