Coney Island: Amusement at Any Price

Friday, November 17, 2023

9:46 a.m.

Brooklyn, New York City, New York

Despite my feelings, I wanted to go to Coney Island. It’s not that I didn’t want to see it, but I was thinking that I couldn’t relate to any of it. Ticketed lines. Curated amusement. Shrieking children. I’ve heard there were fast times and bright lights, here, but I arrived in the morning in a less touristy hour on the cold coast, leaving me as one of the few observers of a perfectly normal weekday in the Big Apple.

Everything checks out here. Street philosophers shouting their truth into the ether. Old Jewish women walking ankle-biters. Russian teens staring at their phones. The occasional whiff of urine and the sporadic clickity-clack of the F Train muffling shouts from handball players.

It’s only after you walk past the barrage of street philosophers that you begin to feel what Coney Island meant in its heyday as America’s Playground. Towering amusement, strikingly colored. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed purveyors of cheesesteaks, slushies, and, of course, hot dogs. Not the dirty-water dogs you can get on nearly any street corner. Here, it’s a snappy Nathan’s. Is it really the taste of New York? It’s as on-point as mystery meat halal carts, at least.

The Boardwalk is home to mid-century travel trailers repurposed as lifeguard stations and restrooms. A period-correct rendition of the Oceanside Grill. The clippety-clop of four generations of Jewish women on half-century-old wood. The smell of greased fittings on Deno’s Wonder Wheel barely covering the stench of inhaled inspiration from those philosophers. A woman painting the Eastern horizon. A man with an interesting hat doing yoga things. And the old-timer on a speaker-loaded beach cruiser pumping pre-war jazz—the original soundtrack.

Although the action is rather thin here, you feel that in any decade, the sentiment would have been the same. Flashes of the past. Pre-war jubilee. Tears for the lost days. Begging for authenticity. Vicarious memories of those long-dead who gathered here as kids, had their first dates, first kisses, and last goodbyes—with pleasure-based diversion sprinkled in between. Have we traded cuffed trousers and two-toned shoes for crisp sneakers and athleisure wear? Sure. But one thing remains the same. Democratized amusement. The only price is the time it took you to get here.

Coney Island tells you all you need to know about American leisure, a small buffer between industrial, commercial, and retail madness. A place where you can enjoy the voluntary thrills of the SkyChaser or win a stuffed creature from the Tube Dash Splash to cool the nerves from those sudden jerks you get from the Q Train heading back to Prospect Park. A place where you can have small adventures in amazing conversations with strangers, watch the street philosophers ride the Scream Zone for free, narrowly avoid pickpockets, or tune into the Old Italian man reminiscing over the empire he built on this Boardwalk.

It’s amusement at any price, whether you buy a ticket or build your own ride. Attractions big and small. Some famous, some infamous. Coney Island is a lodestar of what we were and always will be. A monument to ambition and leisure, even if we get the ratio off sometimes, a nation of loose connections brought together by few things, like amusement—something we’re good at, whether we’re trying or not.

Ankle-biters and Russian shapeups. Bathing suits and beach chairs. Chopped cheese and sidetalk. A view of the breadth and depth of life in America’s largest city; a concrete jungle, a coastal oasis—the full New York experience in a small corner of Brooklyn.