Themed Experience

ch4ck availability
Coney Island: the name still resonates with a sense of racy Brooklyn excitement, the echo of beach-front popular entertainment before World War I. "Amusing the Million" examines the historical context in which Coney Island made its reputation as an amusement park and shows how America's changing social and economic conditions formed the basis of a new mass culture. Exploring it afresh in this way, John Kasson shows Coney Island no longer as the object of nostalgia but as a harbinger of modernity--and the many photographs, lithographs, engravings, and other reproductions with which he amplifies his text support this lively thesis.

1940, 9 minutes
"Scenes of the amusement park's beach, boardwalk, vendors, sideshows and rides."

ch3ck availability
Coney Island is a unique New York City neighborhood and a place of exciting innovation, where the roller coaster and the hot dog were introduced to the world, the glow of a million bare lightbulbs at Luna Park dazzled early visitors, and rocket rides at Astroland fueled intergalactic fantasies. Coney Island served as the pressure valve for New York, drawing millions to its famous beach on sweltering weekends. Astroland Park, created at the dawn of the space age, was the vision of Dewey and Jerome Albert. They transformed the three-acre Feltman's Restaurant property, one of Coney Island's oldest attractions, into a futuristic amusement park that would anchor the amusement zone for the next half century. The park's ambitious opening in 1962 mirrored the wide-eyed optimism of the early 1960s and helped Coney Island survive the closure of the venerable Steeplechase Park.

Before the Civil War, Coney Island boasted a beach, a dozen small hotels with ramshackle bathhouses, some chowder stands and a few saloons. After the war, it was taken over by powerful individuals who made its 0.7 square miles a domain of the wealthy. By 1905, with the population of New York City at four million, the city's amusement park builders designed an entertainment wonderland on the island that even the poor could enjoy, creating a "nickel empire," where visitors paid five cents for the subway, five cents for a Nathan's hot dog and five cents for a ride. In 1910, Coney Island saw 20 million visitors--more than Disneyland and Disney World combined could claim 70 years later, adjusted for population growth. Through the decades, the island has seen changes of fortune, floods and fires, cycles of decay and rehabilitation. Yet the ultimate power on the island was and is the government of the city of New York, which--for good or ill--has made Coney Island what it is today.

"Featuring a stunning gallery of portraits by the world's finest poets, essayists, and fiction writers—including Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, José Martí, Maxim Gorky, Federico García Lorca, Isaac Bashevis Singer, E. E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, Colson Whitehead, Robert Olen Butler, and Katie Roiphe—this anthology is the first to focus on the unique history and transporting experience of a beloved fixture of the New York City landscape. "

ch3ck availability
*Includes pictures of the various amusement parks and rides*Traces the history of Coney Island and includes accounts of the old amusement parks and rides*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading*Includes a table of contents"If Paris is France, Coney Island, between June and September, is the World." - George TilyouThere are few places on Earth that have as much hustle and bustle as New York City, so it's no surprise that people nearby flock to some sort of escape. For many, that escape comes in the form of Brooklyn's Coney Island, which has been one of the area's most popular seaside resorts and amusement park areas since the late 19th century. People may come for different things, such as the festivities held there on July 4th (most notably the hot dog eating contest), the newest rollercoaster, or a minor league baseball game, but just about everyone is sure to have a good time.Like so much of New York's development, the manner in which Coney Island has become what it is over the past 130 years is full of surprise and controversy. For most of its history, Coney Island was virtually uninhabited, even when the native Lenape lived in the region before European explorers arrived, yet that very aspect made the place attractive for vacationers looking to escape city life during the summer. In fact, New York City's leaders tried to prevent development on the island in hopes of establishing it as a giant natural park, only for wealthy resorts to ultimately pop up along beachfront property. Far from it, Coney Island spent the last few decades of the 19th century operating like Las Vegas, with every kind of vice helping keep things running.In time, Coney Island became America's biggest and most visited amusement park resort, with Dreamland, Steeplechase Park, and Luna Park all becoming some of the nation's most famous and historic parks. Although Coney Island's heyday has long since passed and those three parks have all closed, Coney Island remains best known for amusement parks today. The first rides were built on Coney Island in the 1870s, and there are now multiple parks on Coney Island, which has actually since become a peninsula thanks to the addition of landfill over the course of its development. Coney Island: The History of New York City's Most Famous Amusement Park Resort looks at the history of the popular landmark. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Coney Island like never before, in no time at all.

ch3ck availability
"At the beginning of the twentieth century, Coney Island was the uncontested epicenter of America's emerging mass culture. It was the quintessential American resort: the birthplace of the amusement park, the hot dog, and the roller coaster. Its history is one of breathtaking transformation and re-invention. Celebrated for its glittering amusement parks and its enormous crowds, it was in times past a mecca of grand hotels, race tracks, beer gardens, gambling dens, concert saloons, and dance halls. A new mass culture began to take shape there. Its harshest critics decried it as Bedlam by the Sea, but others deemed it as a necessary outlet for the masses where the democratic spirit was granted free rein. Despite its precipitous decline, Coney Island remains a metaphor for the American amusement industry and the hundreds of honky-tonk resorts and amusement parks it has spawned. Coney Island: The People's Playground is the first new history of Coney Island in almost half a century, tracing its evolution and cultural impact as an amusement center from its earliest development as a seaside resort to the present day Mermaid Parade. Presented in a photo-documentary format featuring more than one hundred vintage photos, archival material, personal accounts, and contemporary sources, the book evokes the atmosphere of the resort as experienced by those who visited it during its heyday. Through the reminiscences of nineteenth and twentieth century writers, literary figures, and amusement historians, Michael Immerso traces Coney Island's remarkable evolution and subsequent decline, while at the same time examining the remarkable individuals and complex social forces that contributed to its rise and fall. Coney Island is not merely a documentary of the amusement industry or the story of a fabled amusement park, but rather a narrative of the way Americans, and particularly immigrants and urban Americans, came to regard the pursuit of leisure as part of their national birthright."

ch3ck availability
A captivating look at Coney Island and its iconic place in the history of American art Called "America's playground," Coney Island is a world-famous resort and national cultural symbol that has inspired music, literature, and films. This groundbreaking book is the first to look at the site's enduring status as inspiration for artists throughout the ages, from its inception as an elite seaside resort in the mid-19th century, to its evolution into an entertainment mecca for the masses, with the eventual closing of its iconic amusement park, Astroland, in 2008 after decades of urban decline. How artists chose to portray Coney Island between 1861 and 2008--in tableaux of wonder and menace, hope and despair, dreams and nightmares--mirrored the aspirations and disappointments of the era. This dazzling catalogue highlights more than 200 images from Coney Island's history, including paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, posters, film stills, architectural artifacts, and carousel animals. An extraordinary array of artists is represented, from George Bellows, William Merritt Chase, Reginald Marsh, and Joseph Stella to Diane Arbus, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Frank, Red Grooms, Weegee, and Swoon. Essays by prominent scholars analyze Coney Island through its imagery and ephemera as both a place and an idea--one that reflected the collective soul of the nation.

31 pages, reproduced from best and latest photographs