Coney Island -History Repeats Itself
First, let’s start with the most obvious example of history repeating itself.
Nearly every week, I tell someone from my former homeland of Long Island where I now live in Brooklyn.
Then they, without fail, tell me that they have no idea where I’m talking about.
“I’m only a few minutes from Coney Island!” I proclaim with pride. Hoping that I’ve offset their stress at trying to ‘do’ geography.
And then they make this face. It’s kind of like… when a baby spits up their oatmeal and the mom is all, “OMG HOW CUTE” and you, as a bystander are like, “that’s…disgusting…but I need to be polite…but I also can’t hide my disgust…so I’ll do one of these weird smiles that actually looks like I’m in pain.”
Basically, they hit me with this look:
Courtesy: Philadelphia Magazine
And I know why.
It’s not a reaction overtly rooted in racism. It’s a discomfort with the unfamiliar tinged with ‘what-they-saw-on-the-news.’
And to some degree I get it.
In films and TV shows, the Coney Island Boardwalk is chock full of carnival barkers in straw hats and little girls in polka dotted dresses and everything is made of cotton candy and absolutely nobody is getting fingered under the boardwalk.
Then you visit Coney Island Boardwalk in real life.
One man, presumably high on LSD, has brought a portable speaker that is playing the same Earth, Wind, and Fire tunes over and over as he shouts, “Hey! OLD-SCHOOL-DISCO” repeatedly. At least 15% of everyone’s hair is colored blue, red, or pink. There’s a random used condom next to an overturned box of cheese fries.
The iconic food spots make you take out a loan to be able to afford even just an ice cream cone. There’s a lady, probably named Linda, who has definitely been smoking since eight years old, yelling at you to, “step up to her game booth to win a prize.” The prize? Your choice of taking home her her last functional tooth that she just spit out trying to open a beer bottle with her teeth OR a lap dance. The iconic Zoltar in a box asks you to borrow five dollars so that he can buy some weed instead of delivering a prophecy.
To a certain extent…I get it.
But then there’s seemingly ‘normal’ things that make outsiders ‘uncomfortable.’ The salsa music going at full tilt…the coarse emphasis on consonant letters coming from a Russian speaking person…an Asian woman collecting cans off to the side…
*Gasp* Coney Island isn’t full of people who look like Dick and Jane!
The “star spangled wonderland” that many people come looking for is gone.
But, let me clue you in on a secret. Nothing has actually changed.
Courtesy: Brooklyn Eagle
The real fact is that many people visit Coney Island looking for an ‘all-American aesthetic’ and fail to realize that, there is nothing more American than the clashing of classes and cultures culminating in a sensory overload on the Boardwalk. What a brilliant metaphor that happens to be rooted in reality and history. Throughout time, the story of the United States has been how do we take all of our cultures, religions, values, skin colors, and make this work as one nation?
This is literally the history of Coney Island. The place is a microcosm of that entire experiment.
From its earliest days, Coney Island has been a hot bed for all types of folks from all walks of life mixing together to sun bathe, swim, and pay too much for a fucking funnel cake.
Maybe you’d like to imagine that there were a bunch of Ward Cleaver look-alikes saying things like, “Gee Golly! It’s a hot day!” But that’s just not the case.
Even in the 19th century days of Poe, P.T Barnum, and Whitman, coming over to Coney Island by way of fucking wagon (who all loved the variety of people at Coney – BTW), other people marked on how the lack of homogeneous people was discomforting. The writer Charles Dawson Shanley, a contemporary of the aforementioned, in his essay entitled, “Coney Island” refers to the gathering of diverse types of people there as a “motley crew.”
In the 20th century, sausage eating Italians, shouting Irish, along with African Americans, Jews, and Germans all gathered together — two million strong on one particular Independence Day in the 1940s.
And what was the reaction of earlier Americans upon seeing this? People like my Italian grandmother and her Russian-Jewish step father?
Courtesy: Philadelphia Magazine
Yeah, exactly. Why? Because hearing Italian being spoken and seeing burly Jewish men eating herring on the beach didn’t *feel* very American to those who weren’t immigrants.
How remarkably foolish do quotes about Coney Island, such as this one, seem in today’s context?
Honestly, the woman peddling her mango and chili sauce cart to make a living is the most American fucking thing in the world! Lovingly selling a popular food from your homeland at a kind of lower cost than the other lady on the boardwalk in order to attract more customers? That’s capitalism, baby! In the 1920’s that same woman existed, except maybe she sold sausage and peppers. Or even, FELTMAN’S TURNED NATHAN’S HOTDOGS. See? Nothing’s changed.
Courtesy: Coney Island History Project
I like strolling the boardwalk and hearing Spanish, Russian, Urdu — what have you. I don’t speak any of those languages well, but in an odd way, they make me feel at home. I like seeing a twinkle in the eyes of an immigrant couple as they watch their children run ahead of them, over-priced ice cream cones in hand. It’s the look of excitement to be living here, right here, in Brooklyn in the United States of America. Sometimes, I even get a tear in my eye. I wonder if my ancestors, who did in fact stroll the Coney Island Boardwalk as immigrants, had that same look of eager anticipation in their eyes. I wonder if the aforementioned couple shares the same sentiments as my immigrant in laws and the immigrants in my family line as they watch their kids dart to the Wonder Wheel with huge smiles. That sentiment being that for moments like that one…moving to America was all worth it.
