A Coney Island Reader, edited by Louis J. Parascandola and John Parascandola (foreword)

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forewORd Kevin Baker

about Coney to say that it won’t work out the way anybody’s saying it will,” Richard Snow, Coney Island’s most perceptive chronicler, told me once, referring to the proposal of the Department of City Planning to rezone Coney Island—the latest in a long series of attempts to cover the island with respectable people doing respectable things.

What Snow understands is what a very complicated place Coney is. It’s easy to lose one’s direction out there, amid the surf and the sand and all the amusements. Coney changes constantly, as barrier islands do, but to try to make those changes adhere to a particular human scheme is something else again. You might as well try to plan the sea.

Louis and John Parascandola bring that realization home in this splendid and important compilation of writings on Coney. Putting all these diverse observations—fiction and nonfiction, verse and journalism, and memoirs and official reports—between two covers is a critical achievement, for only in this way can we see what a chimera Coney is, how it shifts and vanishes and re-forms right before our eyes.

Those who visit Coney with preconceived notions about it tend to fare badly. Revolutionaries, especially, have trouble with Coney. One would like to have heard what Sigmund Freud really thought about the place after his visit in 1909. Referring to the genteel, bourgeois park of his native Vienna, he remarked only that Coney Island was “a magnified Prater,” which it most certainly was not.

“I think I know enough

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José Martí, in exile from Cuba, dreaming of poetry and plotting revolution, gives us almost a parody of the melancholy poet in his dispatch to a Bogotá newspaper. He manages to condemn in the same sentence both those American mothers who take their young children to stroll along the summer beach—“concerned only with their own pleasure and never fearing that the biting air will harm the child’s natural delicacy”—and those “ladies who abandon their babies in hotel rooms to the arms of some harsh Irishwoman.”

Maxim Gorky is funnier but no less disdainful. “Hell is very badly done,” he tells us of one Dreamland exhibit, and claims that he is unable to find “even the suggestion of beauty” in the great parks, concluding that “one thing alone is good in the garish city: You can drink in hatred to your soul’s content, hatred sufficient to last thruout [sic] life, hatred of the power of stupidity!”

In the end, both men returned home to die for their revolutions. The people whom Martí disapproved of so thoroughly erected a very poetic statue of him, falling from his horse after being shot, at the entrance to another one of their pleasure groves: Central Park. And, almost despite himself, Martí wrote of Coney as “a town of stars—and of orchestras, dances, chatter, surf sounds, human sounds, choruses of laughter and praise for the air, hawkers’ loud cries, swift trains and speedy carriages, until it is time to go home.”

How romantic! And how romantic to think of his audience, the newspaper readers of Bogotá, dreaming of Coney Island in 1883, high in the mountains of Colombia. More than twenty years later, Gorky put aside his hate to render his own description, as quoted in Peter Lyon’s “The Master Showman of Coney Island”: “With the advent of night a fantastic city all of fire suddenly rises from the ocean into the sky. Thousands of ruddy sparks glimmer in the darkness, limning in fine, sensitive outline on the black background of the sky shapely towers of miraculous castles, palaces, and temples. . . . Fabulous beyond conceiving, ineffably beautiful, is this fiery scintillation.”

It’s not surprising that they should have been so confused, because, of course, it’s the nature of Coney Island to confuse. Even Coney’s own revolutionary, Frederic Thompson, inventor of Luna Park, the most glorious amusement park ever created, seems befuddled, insisting that fun must be

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“manufactured” and that he builds only for “that ninety-five per cent of the American public [that is] pure and good.” The plasterboard heads of leering clowns and wolves and pigs that he mounted all around his park told a different story. So did the fantastic, disorienting architecture of Luna Park, which was not any real architecture at all but his own, surreal invention.

Coney Island is a carnival, and, as at any carnival, the Lord of Misrule runs away with all of us, even the pure and the good. Everything is on edge or turned upside down; everything is unsettled.

It is at Coney where Delmore Schwartz cries, “Don’t do it!” at his own parents’ courtship, and Henry Miller laments, “Everything is sliding and crumbling, everything glitters, totters, teeters, titters.” It is where James Huneker marveled a hundred years ago that “humanity sheds its civilisation and becomes half child, half savage.” Where Giuseppe Cautela tells us, “You are shown all the punishments of sin and all the rewards of virtue.

You become forgetful of both, and your body, taking on wings, flies through the air with the speed of a meteor.”

It is where Colson Whitehead reminds us, “Everything disappears into sand.” Where a young Isaac Bashevis Singer collapses into a deep sleep and finds “the secret of time, space, and causality. It seemed unbelievably simple, but the moment I opened my eyes it was all forgotten. What remained was the taste of something otherworldly and marvelous.”

Even the most marvelous of Coney’s manmade attractions were and are cheap, flimsy things, as Fortune’s anonymous correspondent reminded the magazine’s readers in 1938: “At close range, in the hard early morning light. . . . Shoddy shows through the tinsel. . . . At six in the morning Coney Island is like the stage of a very old theatre before the audience arrives.”

Coney has always needed people to animate it, give it romance, meaning, dread. Why they should arrive at all is enough to baffle Huneker, who claims that he can’t understand the place’s allure: “Why, after the hot, narrow, noisy, dirty streets of the city, do these same people crowd into the narrower, hotter, noisier, dirtier, wooden alleys of Coney?”

Yet come they did, and come they always would.

Sex was an attraction, of course. So, too, was Freud’s other great human instinct. Richard Le Gallienne ventures the thought that “death, or at least the fear of it, as always, still holds a foremost place in popular amusements,” and no doubt he was at least partly right. Death was there in 1910,

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when the motorman-operated Rough Riders roller coaster failed to negotiate a turn, sending four cars and sixteen passengers flying into the air, thirty feet above Surf Avenue. Four of them died that day—which bothered everyone so much that the Rough Riders rode on to kill three more passengers in 1915.

Pondering the same question about Coney Island in the era of the great parks (1897–1911), I wondered why it was that people who lived in constant fear of fire in ramshackle, deathtrap tenements should want to see spectacles such as Dreamland’s exhibit Fighting the Flames, in which just such a building is set ablaze for every performance. It occurred to me that it was the same reason why they came to gape at the tableaux of the Johnstown Flood or the eruption of Mount Pelée on Martinique, why they came to watch the U.S. Navy battle all the nations of the world or the incubator babies struggle for breath, or why they came to gawk at even the gilded electrical plants that powered the parks. They were there to see the pageant of their lives, and their time, played out before them.

Or maybe it was the sea or the cotton candy or the hot dogs. Maybe what William Henry Bishop describes as the “regiment of charlatans [who] detain you, one after another.” Or, as Reginald Wright Kauffman’s observes, “Of course, you are probably quite as ridiculous at all times as you are at Coney, but at Coney you are a little more egregiously and much more merrily ridiculous.”

Indeed. And yet still they come. The Colson Whiteheads and the Katie Roiphes, in the footsteps of Henry Miller and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, still trying to climb inside that Coney Island of the mind. “South,” Whitehead commands us, “to the beach where a broom of briny air sweeps away this miserable funk . . . to the bottom of the subway map, settling there like loose change in various denominations.”

It is where Roiphe hears “not the sleek modern sound of speed” but “speed from another era” aboard the Cyclone, where she becomes “nothing but stomach, air, and fear” but “wonder[s] woozily why I feel so good.”

(José Martí would agree, in his way.)

Near the very end of this volume, you will find the latest determination of the other city, the city of power and wealth that looms just over the horizon, to bury once and for all the carnival in Coney. To turn it into one more place full of seaside condos, to make it safe for the pure and the good, or at

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least the solvent and the well insured. You will find as well the small, futile protest raised by some of us who love Coney Island.

I suspect that Richard Snow is right and that the island will ignore us both. All the grand plans for “redevelopment” will never come to pass, like so many other grandiose undertakings of the past.

Or perhaps, in this era of rapid climate change, Coney is saving its greatest trick of all for last: to disappear. Once it is carbuncled with condominium towers, it will simply sink beneath the water, clutching its last attraction, a drowned city, under the waves—a reef full of shiny-eyed fish, winding their way through all the bright enamel fixtures and the marble kitchen counters. It will be the perfect exit, turning all that people did there and all that they planned for it into an illusion.

“Never was there a time better fitted than yesterday,” Walt Whitman writes, and never was yesterday better fitted anywhere than to Coney Island.

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