In The Island Review

Coney Island: on the Magic of the Marginal (Excerpt)

The tide of history has not been kind to Coney Island. At the turn of the century its light shone auspiciously, and it remained an exciting fixture of the New York landscape through the pre-war years, immortalized for many in Woody Allen’s depiction of having grown up in the house under the roller coaster in Annie Hall. Post-war, however, due to a variety of factors, Coney began a grim decline into near collapse – always just ticking on, admittedly, but with an increasing reputation as antiquated and irrelevant. Its once-shiny technologies now appeared historic, its shows lacklustre and its visitors humdrum. Where the gritty and the glamorous had once jostled together, now the elites vacated and the hotels shut down, leaving only the poor and the middling to muddle along. The sole resurrection and source of vitality in these dreary years was gang-life, which flourished anew in the fifties and sixties – in Coney as well as in other Brooklyn frontiers such as Red Hook, as reflected in Marlon Brando’s watery eyes in On The Waterfront. 

Beginning in the 1980s, an effort at renewal has ensured some commercial success, but it is still more concerned with legacy than any genuine revitalization. The advertising, the hot dogs served at the now iconic Nathan’s, and even the rides themselves seem unchanged since Coney’s pre-war hey-day – somewhat worryingly in the case of the infamous Cyclone: built in 1927, restored in 1975, and still trilling unnervingly with the same rickety wooden slats that must have seemed so fresh to its original riders. Its proximity to Manhattan, having once lent it relevance on the American stage, now merely serves as a reminder that while Manhattan has moved headlong into the twenty-first century, Coney remains stuck. Its marginality to the heaving centre now provides a dusty, almost homely quality: like that of a film star’s poor cousin, who was once afforded a moment of fame by the relation, but whose return to the ordinary then stings all the more, every item in her wardrobe palpably less-than her cousin’s.

And yet part of the allure of Coney Island today is exactly in its antiquation, the almost eerily out-of-date sense that today’s visitor experiences. In Coney, time is out of joint. 

Read the full essay here.