Ghosts of Coney Island by Studio Kinglux
Ghosts of Coney Island Introduction ‘Warriors! Warriors! Come out to play!’ If you have ever seen the definitive teen gang movie, The Warriors, you know about Coney Island. If you have ever visited a theme park, then you know Coney Islands influence.
Cyclone rollercoaster or a stay in a giant wooden elephant hotel. It is easy to underestimate the appeal of Coney Island. In its heyday, during the first half of the twentieth century, it attracted several million visitors each year. Following World
of derelict rides whilst homeless people sleep under the boardwalk. Little of its former glory remains except for the occassional bumper car ride or the charming ghost house. Even the quirky beachfront attraction ‘Shoot The Freak’ with its paintball gun and real human targets
Once described as ‘the Worlds playground’, Coney Island, in southernmost Brooklyn, New York was also the world’s original amusement park. Located on a wide beach front, forty five minutes subway ride from New York city, the area lingers like a burlesque ghost town. It wasn’t always this way. The beginnings of Coney Island as a tourist destination started in the mid nineteenth century with elaborate observatories and beach front hotels. In true American fashion, each successive season demanded bigger, greater, more elaborate attractions to lure dollar bills from New Yorkers pockets. Like all the following amusement parks, Coney Island has always been about extracting the maximum amount of money from punters, but always in fair exchange for a few moments of exhilaration. Whether that was from the
War 2 it was allowed to decline and fall prey to decades of ruthless property deals, arson and poor political planning. All that remains is a few streets of shuttered carnival attractions, skeletal rollercoasters, abandoned buildings and levelled spaces where yellow school buses line up like the interior of a Bermuda Triangle for vehicles. What makes Coney Island different from, say Disney World, is that it is nestled amongst housing projects and has always contained homes where working class New Yorkers have lived. There is no entrance fee to the area and it is not fenced off from the surrounding neighbourhood. Coney Island is the neighbourhood. That’s the base ingredient to the alchemy of its appeal. Today, twenty-first century descendents of carnival families live behind the metal grids
seems to have been forced to surrender to merciless economics. But in amongst the feeling of impending doom, the heart of the old style playground lives on. Elusive pockets of vintage entertainment and good old fashioned hospitality, where the visitor is made to feel like a king sparkle like hidden gems. At the Coney Island film festival, I was fortunate enough to meet a few local characters. I stumbled into Captain Bob, an eccentric hardy seadog who besides drinking with his friends at Nathans ‘world famous’ hotdog store, also gives tours around the area. A wandering man posed for photographs by his shopping trolley home outside a store painted like a giant pinball machine. I listened to the ideas of Coney Island biographer Charles Denson and spoke to a family who live behind a beachfront concession store.
I was greeted by apparitions of fifties style trash pin-ups and a host of tattooed denizens who have found their calling in the ghostly remains of Coney. I absorbed the manifesto of Dick Zigun, the self styled ‘fake mayor’ of Coney Island and heard how we can help to restore the area its former glory. His appeals were not against the regeneration of Coney Island, but directed toward a monolithic real-estate developer, which is destroying the New York heritage via a process of attrition. Instead of lurid attractions and old school freakshows, the company seems determined to replace them with generic housing projects and homogenized retail entertainment hubs. I experienced true Coney Island soul. I was made to feel like one of the most special people on earth and welcomed into the Coney family. Whilst all agree that change at the location is inevitable and should be welcomed, the debate rages as to the scale and direction of how this should occur.
Studio Kinglux hopes these photographs will encourage others to seek out the charm of this fascinating place for themselves before it is irreversibly altered. There is much that can be done for Coney Island and to save it for future generations.
To find out more about Coney Island and its proposed uses, and what you can do to help save it please visit: www.imagineconey.com www.coneyisland.com www.dreamlandrollerrink.com www.myspace.com/saveconeyisland
Words and photographs Tony Hill for Studio Kinglux www.kinglux.co.uk
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