Four at Coney Island

Coney Island is a place lodged irretrievably in the memory not only of New Yorkers, but of just about every American, and many more besides. It is one of those semi-mythic New York names, in company with "Wall Street," "the Lower East Side," "Harlem," "42nd Street," and others, that conveys what has become a universal image. Before moving to New York, the sounds of those names brought forth a nostalgic familiarity that I couldn't quite understand. I'd never been to the city, never seen sideshow freaks or the Mermaid Parade, never eaten a classic Nathan's hotdog, but all the same there it sat in my mind as the seminal amusement park, where you went to hang out and stroll the boardwalk and watch carnival barkers and maybe get swindled by a cardsharp offering good odds on three-card monte. In the imagination everyone at Coney Island appears to exist in either the 1940's or the 1890's - bushy sideburns and calliope organs exist cheek by jowl with sailors on leave from duty in the Pacific and suspendered Italians enticing you into their booths to win a prize for the girlfriend. Coney Island is America's playground. This year may be its last.

Well, if not the last of Coney Island the island (originally the westernmost of the collection of pols, sandbars, and islets that litter Jamaica Bay, and now mostly absorbed by the mainland), than perhaps the last of the Coney Island of popular consciousness: Astroland, Nathan's, the Deno's Wonder Wheel, the Freakshows, funnel cakes, free concerts, the boardwalk. The owner of Astroland (the last of the theme parks that have been a mainstay of the waterfront since as early as the 1870's), Carol Hill Alpert, facing decreases in attendance against rising overhead costs, agreed to sell her property to Thor Equities, an investment firm which plans to pour up to $1.5 billion into an extreme makeover of the area by building luxury condos, a hotel, a new roller coaster, and renovating the New York Aquarium (itself built on land once home to amusement areas). The upshot is that Astroland will be closed after the end of the 2008 season. When the plans for the development surfaced in 2006, Thor initially downplayed the project, even going so far as to remove some condo units from the blueprints and emphasizing the beautification and improvement of the area. Critics have pointed out that Thor has a history of acquiring property and fighting for rezoning only to sell at a profit as soon as the city council approves their request - a tactic that combined with a habit of evicting tenants and bulldozing structures prematurely has left Thor-owned areas undeveloped and desolate (Wikipedia: Coney Island). And now they have arrived, bulldozers roaring, to lay waste to another monument to the American story in the name of condo sales and heavy pockets.

My roommate is at Coney Island today, and had I been free I would have gone with him, if for no other reason than to inhale the curious salty-sweet odor that sweeps in from the beach through the close passageways of the amusement booths to Surf Avenue and up into the subway terminal, where one can stand in the morning and watch the hopeful families, the playful twenty-somethings keen to indulge in ironical nostalgia and get a tan, the natives who remember the old days and know that the place is already lost to them forever, but they might as well get one last hot dog. Then one can return in the evening and watch the slow, happy, sand-crusted and sunburnt procession up the ramps to the waiting trains, see the exhausted joy in flushed faces, young cheeks still grubby and shining with grease and ice cream, damp towels wrapped around sagging bodies, groups huddled round their digital cameras sharing memories. Hopefully everyone who ever goes to Coney Island from now until that horrible day when Thor's bulldozers fire up their engines will fill their camera cards and rolls of film because soon enough, barring a supreme public efforts, that is all that will be left. Change is inevitable, but it doesn't have to be negative. The sad fact, though, is that far too many people at the wheel of change haven't read the map, decide that their "shortcut" will be better for everyone, and wind up lost in a swamp somewhere while the party goes on without them. Somewhere, Coney Island, in all its grimey, debauched glory, will rumble away forever, a crazed cultural Whack-A-Mole Thor's hammer will never strike.