Coney Island's Sideshow by the Sea.
By Denis Hamill
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As a kid growing up in Brooklyn I was convinced that the sandman put the world to sleep with the sands of Coney Island. The singing group the Drifters sang their most famous song, "Under the Boardwalk," about falling in love on a blanket down by the Coney Island sea. But for native Brooklynites like me, a different Drifters song, "Sand in My Shoes," is the true, lasting anthem of Coney Island--because the sands of Coney, as we call it, stay in your shoes a lifetime. Almost invariably, when I meet displaced Brooklynites out of town, they ask reverentially, "Ah, geez, how's Coney?" They might be referring to some magical dreamland Oz of childhood. The very name has a picture-book, cartoony, even celestial ring.
I first went to Coney when I was in diapers. Today, four decades later, I take my own kids there at least twice a month in the summer. A Brooklyn dweller still, I can stand on my roof terrace and see, in the five-mile distance, Coney's famous, 262-foot-high Parachute Jump--no longer operational but decked out in red, white, and blue, courtesy of its recent designation as a national landmark. Built for the 1939 world's fair, "the Parachute" is the Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn.
One morning last summer I stepped out on the terrace, looked out at the Parachute, and could almost taste the hot dogs and french fries of Nathan's Famous and almost hear the carnival barkers, the hurdy-gurdy music of Deno's Wonder Wheel Park and Astroland, and the heart-thumping rumble of the world-famous Cyclone. "Get up, you guys!" I shouted into the house. "We're going to Coney Island!" My two daughters, ages 15 and 10, sat bolt upright in their beds, wiping the sands of what the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti has called "a Coney Island of the mind" from their eyes.
We drove down six-lane Ocean Parkway, past the pedestrian and bicycle mall lined with stately Dutch elms. The word "parkway" was coined by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who (some of us think) practiced on Manhattan's Central Park before getting it right with their design for Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Olmsted and Vaux conceived Ocean Parkway, which was completed in 1876 for the staggering sum of $1 million, as a gracious route on which horse-drawn carriages could convey rich 19th-century Manhattanites to their vacations on Coney Island, at that time a five-mile swirl of perfect Atlantic Ocean beachfront.
Actually, Coney Island is not an island at all but part of a peninsula that is joined by a narrow neck of land to the southernmost tip of the borough of Brooklyn (itself part of Long Island). But at one time, before Coney Island Creek silted up to form a connecting sandbar, Coney was not just one island but a cluster of them. American Indians in the region regarded it as sacred ground. It was "discovered" by the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524 and revisited in 1609 by Henry Hudson. Dutch settlers named it for the abundance of konijnen (rabbits) that ran wild through the dunes and scrub grass. The Dutch gave up Konijn Eiland to the British in 1664.
By the 1840s, the area had developed into a popular resort; in the 1850s, it became accessible via a plank road that charged a horse car a 10-cent toll for the two-hour trip from downtown Brooklyn. A railroad was begun around 1860, and within 25 years six lines were running to Coney. By the turn of the 20th century there were three racetracks and three expensive hotels for the idle rich, who stayed on Coney's eastern end, which the WASPs called Brighton Beach. The middle bays were the province of middle-class folk, who picnicked and surf-bathed and entertained themselves at the few, innocuous amusement arcades.
Coney's western end, however, was considered the epicenter of world depravity. A political-machine boss named John ("Chief") McKane wielded power commensurate with that of his Manhattan counterpart, William Marcy ("Boss") Tweed. McKane would round up convicted felons, throw them into uniforms, and put them to work as part of a private security force for the raucous gambling halls, brothels, freak shows, and saloons that paid him rent. Before long, of course, the uplifters mounted a campaign to reform "Sodom by the Sea," as it had been dubbed by the New York Times.
After McKane rigged an election in 1892 (many who cast votes resided in local cemeteries), he was sent to Sing Sing for election fraud. With his imprisonment, a new era came clanging in. Its symbol was an invention of a man named George Washington Ferris: a 125-foot-high rotating wheel equipped with swinging carriages. The Ferris wheel was brought to Brooklyn from the 1893 Chicago world's fair by a 31-year-old entrepreneur named George C. Tilyou. Tilyou erected what was then the tallest structure in America, and, like the rabbits of Konijn Eiland, the crowds multiplied.
Using the vast profits from his Ferris wheel as well as Thomas Edison's breakthroughs in electricity, Tilyou built the short-lived Sea Lion Park, America's first walled amusement park.Two years later, in 1897, he opened Steeplechase Park. Its flagship amusement, a British import that moved riders in mechanical horses along a curved, half-mile course in just half a minute, owed its success largely to the fact that "men and women liked almost anything that allowed them to grab hold of each other," as a commentator in the filmmaker Ric Burns's superb documentary "Coney Island" puts it.
Next came Luna Park, the second of what would be Coney Island's three legendary parks, in 1903. A kind of precursor to Disney's Epcot Center, Luna Park displayed a magical hodgepodge of architectural styles, from Romanesque to art nouveau, all lit up with 250,000 of Mr. Edison's incandescent lightbulbs. At night, the park could be seen by sailors 30 miles out at sea.
Luna Park was followed by Dreamland and a million lightbulbs. Featuring such futuristic attractions as a simulated trip to the moon, an entire working village populated by midgets, one of the first incubators (complete with resident premature infants), and simulations of Mount Vesuvius erupting, Dreamland became popularly known as "the Electric Eden." Suddenly Brooklyn, which the 1880 census had established as the country's third-largest city, was riding high, and Coney Island--a.k.a. "City of Fire," "the Poor Man's Paradise," "America's Playground," and "the Eighth Wonder of the World"--was its crowning jewel.
Travelers from all over the globe flocked to Coney. On a single day in 1906, some 200,000 postcards were mailed from here. Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman (who liked to compose poetry to the sound of rolling surf), and Mark Twain had already visited. Now Sigmund Freud, on his only trip to America, in 1909, paid a visit to Dreamland. Maxim Gorky came from the nascent Soviet Union and, while condemning Coney's exploitation of workers, pronounced it "fabulous beyond conceiving, ineffably beautiful." After a subway line to Coney was built, in 1920, all New York could come here with ease--and on many a summer Sunday it seemed as if it had.
Coney was also a popular stomping ground for big-name politicians, presidents, movie stars, athletes, and gangsters. With his constant companion, the singer and actress Lillian Russell, on his arm, Diamond Jim Brady strutted the boardwalk in diamond-studded sandals, indulging in great eating binges that included dozens of oysters and hot dogs from Feltman's Ocean Pavilion. This immigrant-owned eatery was one of the first to serve the German-style sausages called frankfurters inside a long white roll. The delicacies were nicknamed "Coney Island hots" and, later, "hot dogs" because of their supposed resemblance to dachshunds.
By 1938, according to Fortune magazine, Coney Island boasted 13 carousels, 70 ball games, 11 roller coasters, five tunnel rides, three fun houses, two wax museums, six penny arcades, 20 shooting galleries, three freak shows, and 200 eating establishments. In the summer of 1938, 25 million visitors spent some $35 million. The largest crowd ever recorded came on July 4, 1947, when 1.3 million, a third of the city's population, converged on a beach that erosion had by then shrunk to three miles in length.
Some observers attribute the slow decline of Coney Island to the advent of television and air-conditioning--two inventions that curtailed people's impulse, on hot summer nights, to flee their houses for entertainment and a cool sea breeze. Others date the demise of Coney Island to a single event: the electrocution in 1903 of Topsy, an elephant who was one of Luna Park's main attractions. In need of a flashy way to demonstrate the superiority of his direct current over Westinghouse's competing product, alternating current, Thomas Edison filmed Topsy's execution (decreed after the great beast panicked and killed a drunk who'd fed it a lit cigarette). Edison screened the movie for his clients as proof that direct current was "strong enough to kill an elephant!"
Eight years later, a fire devoured Dreamland, and, during World War II, Luna Park caught fire. Steeplechase Park closed its doors in 1965 and was torn down in 1966. Coney Island's golden age and nickel age (when everything, from a subway ride to a hot dog to a beer to a game of chance, cost five cents) was unequivocally over.
But those of us who had kissed a date in the Tunnel of Love or ridden the Parachute or dared to try the Cyclone or built a sand castle on the beach refused to let Coney Island die. Today, after a bleak period during which the whole area was largely given over to crime and poverty, Coney Island is showing definite signs of revival. And, as before, it is immigrants who are responsible for this vitality.
"I come from there," Deno Vourderis told me last year, a few months before he died. Sitting on a bench in the shadow of the Wonder Wheel, he pointed out across the Atlantic to the horizon as my kids climbed aboard the Thunderbolt, one of the 24 rides in Deno's Wonder Wheel Park.
Deno jumped ship from a Greek freighter in 1939. Down on his luck, unable to speak English, he got on what he thought was a bread line but what turned out to be a recruitment line; he ended up in the U.S. Army. He fought in World War II, returned, sold ice cream in Connecticut, and then came to New York in 1959 and bought a hot-dog wagon on the Coney Island boardwalk in front of Ward's Kiddie Land. "I saved my money and got a second wagon and saved some more," he says.
Soon Deno bought the amusement park, and today the first thing you see when you approach Coney Island by subway, car, or the sea over which he traveled is his 150-foot Wonder Wheel, another national landmark. "I jumped ship and made my fortune in Coney Island," Deno said. "Now my American sons run the place. It's the American dream come true."
Just 100 wooden yards from Deno's, Ruby Jacobs operates one of the last saloons on the boardwalk. "Once there were maybe thirty places like this," Ruby said, standing amid the hundreds of historical photographs of Coney Island that adorn the walls of his cavernous tavern. "Sailors from all over the world came to drink nickel beers and kiss pretty girls and win them kewpie dolls at a game of chance and test their manhood on the hammer-and-bell games. Every saloon in the neighborhood was packed. No matter who you were, beer was a nickel. I still charge only two dollars. And last year I did a record business."
"Coney is coming back in a big, big way," Ruby continued. "The beach is free. In the summer we have the largest police force in the city, so it's safe. And businesses are starting to open again."
One of those businesses is the legendary Atlantis saloon, just steps away, at Boardwalk and Stillwell Avenue. I explained to my kids that my dad used to take me and my brothers down here to Coney on the subway, secure his "spot" at the open-air bar in the Atlantis, and tell us to go down and play in the sand. We always knew where he'd be, reading the sports pages or watching a ball game on TV, drinking a beer as we built sand castles, buried each other up to our necks, and ate sandy peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
For the moment, the Atlantis was shuttered and padlocked, but the sounds of hammering could be heard from within, where a young man named John Lambros was laying a new bar on top of the old. "There's still magic here," Lambros explained. "That's why I've decided to reopen the Atlantis."
Over in Sideshows by the Seashore, Dick D. Zigun, the artistic director of Sideshows and the Coney Island Museum, has resurrected a piece of the forgotten Coney Island, when Jo-Jo the Dogfaced Boy, the Man with Three Legs, and the Human Alligator once mesmerized the hordes. "When I opened, twelve years ago, I wanted Coney Island to be the capital of the weird again," said Zigun, who has an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. "We are the only nonprofit sideshow in history." The shows feature the Illustrated Man (covered head to foot with 25,000 tattoos), a sword swallower, a fire-eater, a snake charmer, a bearded lady, a glass-eater, and an escape artist.
"Seventy thousand people came to see our show last summer," Zigun said, "but our biggest attraction is the Mermaid Parade. That draws half a million people every year for athree-mile parade of mermaids and mermen, six-foot lobsters, Neptunes, floats, marching bands, giant starfish." He gestured toward the Atlantic with a sweep of his hand. "How can anyone not love Coney?"
Since sewage dumping was prohibited here a few years ago, the waters are cleaner than they have been in a decade. Members of the wonderfully wacky Polar Bear Club still swim here in the coldest months of winter, and in summer the sands are cleaned daily with huge combines. The federal government has just begun a $27 million project to replenish the parts of the beach washed away in storm erosion.
I pounded the boardwalk (at three miles, one of the world's longest) as the kids gathered shells. Walking from Brighton, at the east, to the private community of Sea Gate, at the far west, we passed through a global village of various ethnic groups.
Russian and East-bloc emigres jammed the first five bays of Brighton, an area known as Little Odessa. At night, Russian restaurants like Odessa offer delicious, reasonably priced food, music, and ethnic dancing--and, of course, vodka at every table. In the next set of bays over, hard rock battles with rap and salsa in a steamy urban carnival of gyrating, tanned bodies. Farther west are the "subway bays," which are filled with families from all over the city who come to Coney by riding the subway to the last stop.
The western bays, populated by the Italian Americans of Bensonhurst, are the closest Coney has to Muscle Beach. The hard, oiled bodies of the guys and girls, sculpted in nearby Gold's Gym, ripple more turbulently than the surf.
One of the star attractions along the boardwalk is the New York Aquarium, on Boardwalk and West Eighth Street. According to its director, Louis Garibaldi, the aquarium, the nation's oldest, is one of the top five in the country; it has just had a $36 million overhaul and features more than 10,000 living specimens from the sea, including seven beluga whales, sand-tiger sharks, dolphins, walruses, sea otters, giant octopi, penguins, and seals. In the newly designed Discovery Cove, you can ripple through salt marshes and touch tanks of starfish and sea urchins. Or you can attend a show at the Aquatheater, where bottlenose dolphins and sea lions ham it up for those curious landlubbers called human beings.
After leaving the Aquarium, we strolled the boards to Astroland Amusement Park, where you can pay for each ride separately or buy a Pay One Price band ($12.99) and sample every ride.
The 60-mile-an-hour Cyclone, built in 1927 and still the most famous roller coaster in the world, has an 85-foot drop--recommended for only the strong of heart. The 290-foot Astro tower offers a romantic nighttime aerial view of Coney. My kids chose the refreshing Water Flume, a waterborne roller coaster that will splash you through a broiling summer afternoon. The truly adventurous set sail on a ship ride called the Pirate or defy gravity on the Break Dancer.
After a day of rides and shooting galleries, Skee-ball, bumper cars, arcades, merry-go-rounds and spook houses, a walk on the shore, and lunch at Nathan's Famous, where the best hot dog in creation sells for under two dollars, you might even consider some four-star dining in Coney Island. Gargiulo's, on West 15th Street between Surf and Mermaid avenues, is one of the best Italian restaurants in the city. At the bar, you can sometimes find celebrities, pols, or Eddie Zigo, one of the cops who arrested Son of Sam, the notorious 1977 serial killer (Zigo was played by Martin Sheen in the TV movie, which was filmed here), holding court. Another survivor from Coney Island's heyday is Carolina's, around the corner on Mermaid Avenue. Built in 1928, just seven years after the boardwalk opened, it too serves excellent Italian food at reasonable prices. It was recently renovated--a sign of confidence in Coney Island's future.
The kids were yawning. Before leaving Coney, I made a final stop, at Sister Cathy's Gypsy Palm Reading, located directly across from Nathan's. Sister Cathy was short and squat and had feet the size of hors d'oeuvres, a gap where two lower front teeth should have been, and a mustache that glistened in the day's dying sun.I paid my five dollars, and she took my hand in hers.
"Much money has been lost by these hands," Sister Cathy told me, looking into my palms, suddenly sweaty with eerie truth. "But you will live a long life, very long, and get your fortune back."
One final, truly important question: If I live a long life and make a fortune, will there also be a Coney Island in which to spend it? "There better be, pal, or else I'm out of a job," Sister Cathy said, with a cackle worthy of one of Dick Zigun's sideshow attractions.
The kids slept all the way home, compliments of the sandman of Coney Island.
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