Coney Island: the Limits and Possibilities of Leisure in Turn of the Century American Culture
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CONEY ISLAND: THE LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES OF LEISURE IN TURN OF THE CENTURY AMERICAN CULTURE A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of The School of Continuing Studies and of The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Liberal Studies By Callahan Pauline Seltzer, B.A. Georgetown University Washington, D.C. April 11, 2011 CONEY ISLAND: THE LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES OF LEISURE IN TURN OF THE CENTURY AMERICAN CULTURE Callahan Pauline Seltzer, B.A. Mentor: Charles Yonkers, J.D. ABSTRACT Coney Island’s location near Manhattan, its wide beaches, and its unique mix of high- and low-brow leisure amusements made it a popular destination for New York City’s wealthy and poor throughout the 1880s. Crooked politics and iniquitous attractions—brothels, gambling dens, and saloons—alienated the middle class and degraded Coney’s reputation in these years. As a result, Coney Island (“Coney”) became the target of spirited “anti-vice” sentiment and early progressive reform movements that swelled locally among middle class citizens and limited their participation in leisure there. In 1895, in pursuit of middle class patrons, developers created an entirely new brand of attraction at Coney’s core: the enclosed amusement park. These parks represent a concerted effort to lure New York City’s middle class, which consisted of ordinary, educated, Protestant men and women, to Coney Island. By targeting middle class patrons, these private, gated parks extended the possibilities of leisure to them in new ways. Between 1895 and 1911, a series of these enclosed amusement parks became increasingly popular among middle class patrons, who came in throngs every week, in spite of a solid anti-vice reform movement that persisted there. It is the purpose of this study to closely examine leisure culture and the middle class as reformers and patrons of Coney Island’s development, to show that these seemingly contradictory roles were ii emblematic of changing middle class values. While reform efforts were part of a growing desire for moral transformation and change, the enclosed amusement parks offered a similar feeling of transcendence. Most explicitly, this study shows how commercial enterprise, through the enclosed amusement parks, evolved middle class values, trumped the influence of reformers, and laid the foundation for the rise of the twentieth century’s culture of middle class consumerism. iii DEDICATION To my parents, for showing me the circus. iv EPIGRAPH We are young, and being young we want to be made to laugh, no matter how foolish is the method by which you do it; we are young and we believe everything, therefore do the most impossible things and we will pretend to believe them and applaud; we are poor…make us forget that there are luxuries and perhaps necessities beyond our means—stir us so that we will remember the hours that we are spending with you for months to come; we are tired and weary and overworked—don’t add to our burdens, lighten them by your most fantastic and foolish endeavors. Frederick Thompson, Fooling the Public v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT...............................................................................................................ii DEDICATION...........................................................................................................iv EPIGRAPH................................................................................................................v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.....................................................................................vii INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: EARLY DEVELOPMENT YEARS ..................................................13 CHAPTER 2: NEW LEISURE OPPORTUNITIES AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY......................................................................................42 CHAPTER 3: LEISURE AND PLEASURE PREVAIL...........................................67 CHAPTER 4: LEISURE MEETS NEW LIMITS .....................................................93 CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................123 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................127 vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure Page 1. Copy of Original Map of Coney Island, from the 1860s ......................................3 2. Map of Coney Island and Surrounding Areas........................................................12 3. John Y. McKane ....................................................................................................24 4. The Elephant Hotel ................................................................................................29 5. Shoot-the-Chutes at Sea Lion Park........................................................................44 6. George C. Tilyou ...................................................................................................47 7. Drawing of Steeplechase Park ...............................................................................51 8. Seaside Park, 1904.................................................................................................66 9. Map of Coney Island’s Bowery, 1907 ...................................................................68 10. Original postcard from Luna Park’s “Trip to the Moon” ....................................73 11. Fred Thompson ....................................................................................................78 12. Luna Park at Night...............................................................................................85 13. “Fire and Flames” at Luna Park, 1904.................................................................89 14. Bowery after fire of 1903.....................................................................................98 15. Luna Park, 1905...................................................................................................101 16. Dreamland’s Beacon Tower ................................................................................107 17. Map of Coney Island Amusement Parks .............................................................109 18. “Creation” at Dreamland......................................................................................111 19. Postcard from Steeplechase Park.........................................................................115 20. Fighting the Dreamland Fire, 1911......................................................................117 vii 21. Aftermath of the Dreamland Fire, 1911...............................................................120 viii INTRODUCTION Coney Island began as a quiet, sandy strip on the southwestern end of Long Island.1 Its earliest known inhabitants were the Native American Canarsie tribe, who roamed there when Henry Hudson arrived in 1609, just one day before he discovered Manhattan.2 Despite its name, Coney Island was never an actual island, but rather separated from the rest of Brooklyn by a thin creek to its north. Its coastline is protected from harsh waves by a nearby barrier reef in the Atlantic Ocean which also served to change its size and shape between 1600 and 1800. Its shifting topography, crippling winter storms, and limited access from nearby Brooklyn and Manhattan hindered its early development. While most of Long Island developed with the rest of urban New York City and the British Colonies, Coney Island would not flourish until after the Civil War. Coney Island’s orientation, stretching from east to west, provides for full sun all day along its five-mile coastline. This fortuitous geography led to Coney’s only development prior to the Civil War: small resorts and restaurants along the coastline. Early developers created these retreats for America’s “upper class” who sought temporary escape from Manhattan and northern parts of Brooklyn, and had both the time and money to vacation. As Jon Sterngass describes in his text, First Resorts, Coney Island was virtually unvisited before the Civil War, except by poets, artists, and the 1 Charles Denson, Coney Island Lost and Found (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2002), 2-5. As Denson describes, pre-Civil War Coney Island still looked very much like it had when the first English settlers, led by Lady Deborah Moody, fled “Puritan religious homogeneity” in Massachusetts. The group settled Coney’s neighboring town of Gravesend in 1643, just nine miles from Manhattan. The town of Gravesend, the original name for the Coney Island settlement, was the only colony in America founded by a woman. 2 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: The Monacelli Press, Inc., 1994), 30. 1 “veritable who’s who of antebellum politics and culture,” including P.T. Barnum, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Sam Houston, Lyman Beecher, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman.3 Perhaps Whitman, who spent summers there, recalls Coney’s vestigial past best: There is a dream, a picture that for years has come noiselessly up before me. It is nothing more or less than a stretch of interminable white-brown sand, hard and smooth and broad, with the ocean perpetually, grandly, rolling in upon it, with the slow measured sweep with rustle and hiss and foam, and many a thump as of low bass drums.4 Whitman’s Coney Island was a pre-Civil War leisure destination enjoyed primarily by New York’s elite.5 For them, Coney Island boasted seaside