A new minor-league ballpark at Coney Island brings baseball
back to Brooklyn. Can it revive an area decimated by urban
renewal and America's infatuation with the automobile?
What magnificent hall of marble, iron, and glass--built about 1900--was
torn down in the mid-1960s, robbing New York of one of the best examples
of Beaux-Arts architecture in the city, if not the world? No, not Penn Station.
The Pavilion of Fun! That grand hall inside Steeplechase Park on Coney Island
that sheltered park-goers on rainy days. It was our Crystal Palace--a giant
space 270 feet wide, 450 feet long, and 63 feet high, with huge glass windows
and Art Nouveau stonework. Fred Trump, Donald's father, tore it down in
1966 to build some condos that never materialized.
The Pavilion of Fun was just one of the many glories that Coney Island,
a strip of land on the outer reaches of Brooklyn, housed in its 150 years
of fame. Like some citadel that has been sacked and burned repeatedly, the
sands of Coney Island hold the traces--or at least the memories--of castles
and ancient empires that rose and fell, rose and fell.
"At Coney Island, where the abiding talent is for the exaggerated and
the superlative, the changes have been so violent and complete as to obliterate,
each time, the memory of what was there before," wrote Edo McCullough,
nephew of George C. Tilyou, who founded Steeplechase Park and built the
Pavilion of Fun. "On one shorefront lot, for example, there has been
in succession an untidy tangle of bathhouses, a vast casino, an arena in
which were fought three world's championship heavyweight prizefights,
the most beautiful outdoor amusement park in the world, a freak show, a
parking lot, and--today--New York City's brand-new aquarium." McCullough
wrote this in his 1957 book Good Old Coney Island, before his uncle's
park and the Pavilion of Fun were torn down, before most of the cereal-box
Corbusier-inspired apartments had replaced the low-rise bungalows and duplexes,
before the amusement-park district had shrunk to a few blocks.
Now Coney Island is changing again. The City of New York has built, near
the boardwalk, a cute ballpark for a Single-A farm team of the Mets, the
Brooklyn Cyclones. Holding just 6,500 people, it allows ball fans to watch
the sand, the sea, and a rising young star belt a fat one all at the same
time. Even more significant, although less hyped, is the complete rebuilding
of the subway station, where four separate lines terminate, and which once
routinely dumped out a million people into Coney Island's downtown on a
hot summer's day. At $250 million--six times the $40 million cost of the
ballpark--the new station will take four years to complete. The city is
also spending $30 million to spruce up the boardwalk, build public bathrooms,
and add other beachfront details; $30 million on youth athletic facilities;
and $10 million on housing and retail along Mermaid Avenue, one of Coney
Island's principal thoroughfares.
Above:
Scenes from Coney Island--a couple poses for a picture on
the beach (top, left); twins weather the elements (top,
right); one of the boardwalk's culinary delights (bottom,
left); the original Nathan's hot-dog stand on a summer day
in 1961 (bottom, right).
The ballpark and all this infrastructure may help revive Coney Island, but
just how and in what style? Once a clear urban grid of streets fed by subways,
Coney Island is now a patchwork quilt of auto-oriented development built
around parking lots and highways--mixed with old-style urban streets built
around subway lines. Will future development be oriented toward the sidewalks
and subway station, or the parking lots and highways? No one knows. Despite
about $350 million in city spending, there is no master plan. Ken Fisher,
a Brooklyn city councilman, says, "There are plans to set up a nonprofit
development corporation to direct investment." He uses the 42nd Street
analogy, as do many believers in Coney Island's potential revival. At some
point, they reason, the area will reach a tipping point--like old porn-saturated
Times Square--and new investment will fiood in.
The history of Coney Island, like the history of all places, is one of transportation.
This barren strip of beach, not really an island but "a clitoral appendage
at the mouth of New York's natural harbor" in Rem Koolhaas's vivid
words in Delirious New York, was ignored for two and a half centuries.
Then about 1850, steamships began visiting the island from Manhattan, which
prompted the development of several luxury hotels. In the 1870s railroad
lines were extended there, and then the hordes arrived. By the early 1900s
Coney Island had three huge amusement parks--Steeplechase Park, Luna Park,
and Dreamland--plus hundreds of other individual attractions, often illicit,
lining the streets. At one time Coney Island had three racetracks and numerous
casinos, and was dubbed "Sodom by the Sea."
Above:
Night at KeySpan Park--giant lollipop lights topped
with 30-foot neons play off the nearby amusement park and
the landmarked Parachute Jump ride (top), which stands just beyond
the right-field fence; the sign for the Wonder Wheel
(bottom left), built in 1928; the dizzying view from atop the
Parachute Jump (bottom right), in 1954.
Between 1915 and 1919 the subway lines to Coney Island were completed. Soon
the traffic on an average summer Sunday went from 100,000 a day to
one million. Ironically, the hordes had a morally cleansing effect: Coney
Island went from being "a city of sin" to being a safe family-oriented
resort. The casinos, whores, and more extravagant displays of weirdness
disappeared. In the place of sin, you rode with your date on the Cyclone
roller coaster, built in 1927, or the Wonder Wheel, built a year later.
Both are still in business. A 1988 report by the Landmarks Preservation
Commission informs us that "most of these rides succeeded because they
combined socially acceptable thrills with undertones of sexual intimacy."
During the depression and World War II, when gasoline was rationed, Coney
Island thrived. A nickel subway ride got you to the beach. But the frenzied
postwar embrace of new highways and cars killed Coney Island. Like Robert
McNamara and the Vietnam War, Robert Moses is ubiquitous in histories of
the 1950s and 1960s, accumulating blame for every urban tragedy. You can
throw in the death of Coney Island. It was the all-powerful parks commissioner
Moses who built Jones Beach and the parkways leading to it. Although in
actual numbers more people continued to visit Coney Island, the people with
money had cars--and they went to Jones Beach. Moses also got control of
the beachfront and encouraged the replacement of frenzied amusements with
bland parks. In Delirious New York, Koolhaas said that for Moses,
"Coney Island becomes--again--a testing ground for strategies intended
ultimately for Manhattan."
