Coney Island

AMERICA'S PLAYGROUND: THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONEY ISLAND Coney Island is more than just a world-famous amusement area in Brooklyn, New York. Over the years, Coney has been known by nicknames from "America's Playground" to "Sodom by the Sea." BEGINNINGS OF THE AMUSEMENT PARK As sea bathing became more popular in the eighteenth century, a few colonial aristocrats visited Gravesend’s beach. Efforts to use Coney Island as a summer resort, however, did not begin until the nineteenth century. The building of a private toll road causeway across the creek separating the island from the mainland in the 1820s made it more accessible (and no longer truly an island). The Gravesend town supervisor also erected an inn providing food and accommodations and promoted the tonic value of sea bathing. Soon a second hotel was erected on the island, and regular stagecoach service from the Brooklyn mainland was instituted. Daily ferry service to the island was initiated in 1844. It was not until after the Civil War, however, that Coney truly began to flourish as a popular resort. A spate of hotels grew up along the beach, and they often included restaurants and facilities for renting bathing costumes. In 1868, one guidebook listed Coney Island as the best beach on the Atlantic coast, and by 1873 it was attracting 25,000 to 30,000 visitors on weekends. A vast amusement zone also grew up there. The first roller coaster built in the United States was opened at Coney Island in 1884. It was a primitive ride by today’s standards. Passengers had to climb a fifty-foot high loading platform to board a train, which was propelled along a wooden track by gravity at the break-neck speed of six miles an hour. The popularity of the coaster encouraged the construction of other amusement rides, such as carousels, toboggan rides, and an aerial slide. In addition to the mechanical rides, there were also dining establishments, dime museums, concert halls, dance pavilions, sideshows, circuses, fireworks displays, games of chance, an aquarium, and other forms of amusement including John Philip Sousa’s marching band and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Many of these amusements were part of the Bowery Midway, an area containing many games, shows, and attractions such as the Streets of Cairo, where one could ride an elephant or camel or watch an erotic “couchee-couchee” dance by performers including the famed Little Egypt. DEMOCRACY AND SEGREGATION The movement, beginning in the 1880s, to grant workers a “half-holiday” on Saturdays led to increased leisure time, which benefited Coney’s entertainment industry. It increasingly became easier and cheaper to get to by rail and offered a variety of inexpensive forms of entertainment and, such as nickel rides and hot dogs. Working class women, who had few places to socialize, were among the groups using Coney as an outlet from their dreary lives. Coney provided a casual and fun atmosphere which encouraged interaction of the sexes and forms of recreation that were less structured and less regulated than in normal social situations. This freedom is perhaps best reflected in the lure of the beach with its scandalous beach attire. Despite Coney’s democratic spirit, which brought together people of various classes, the segregation universal in American society was also seen there. Though Coney was often called the "People’s Playground," not everyone was always allowed to play in the same places. African Americans had to use segregated bath houses and were discouraged from occupying certain sections of the beach. Jews were also not welcome at first in some establishments. CONEY'S HEYDEY Coney entered its heyday at the turn of the twentieth century, with the construction of spectacular amusement parks. The era began with the opening of Sea Lion Park, the first enclosed park where an admission fee was charged on entrance, in 1895. The spectacular Luna Park opened on May 16, 1903. Dubbed the “Electric Eden,” Luna Park was a fantasy land lit by some 250,000 electric lights; in fact, lights from Coney, not the Statue of Liberty or the New York skyline, were the first thing those arriving in New York harbor could see. The park included such attractions as a ride to the moon, another illusion called “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea,” a circus, theatrical performances, and spectacular recreations of several disasters such as the Fall of Pompeii and the Galveston, Texas, flood of 1900. There were elephant and camel rides, a two- hundred foot tower with lights that changed color, and replicas of many cultures including Japan, Ireland, and Italy. The last of the “big three” amusement parks in Coney Island was Dreamland. The park opened in 1904, and was designed to be a grander, even more sophisticated version of Luna Park. The many attractions at Dreamland included a midget city, Frank Bostock’s wild animal show, scenic railways, a ballroom, a Japanese tea pavilion, the Hell Gate boat ride, Dr. Martin Couney’s Infant Incubators (a spectacle in which many premature babies’ lives were actually saved), and the Fighting the Flames exhibition (which featured firefighters battling a staged blaze at a tenement building and rescuing the tenants). As magnificent as the park was, however, it was not a financial success. Dreamland soon went bankrupt and was sold at auction in 1910. It never had another chance to succeed as a fire in 1911 largely destroyed the park. DECLINE Coney was at its peak during the years that the three major amusement parks dominated the scene. It was the major tourist destination in America. Crowds routinely topped 100,000. As John Kasson has argued, Coney in this period reflected major changes in American society, with the emergence of a new mass culture, one in opposition to the more genteel standards in taste and comportment of the Victorian era. The activities available at Coney, such as bathing, dancing, vaudeville and circus acts, mechanical rides, and exotic attractions all catered to this new cultural mood. It was becoming a symbol of fun and frolic, and also of major changes in American manners and morals. PHOTOGRAPHS .

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