by Alex Marshall
Metropolis Magazine
August/September issue, 2001

Today’s Quiz: What magnificent hall of marble, iron and glass, built about 1900, was torn down in the mid 1960s, robbing New York of one of the best examples of Beaux-arts architecture in the city if not the world?

No, not Penn Station. The Pavilion of Fun!!!!!! Of course! That magnificent hall inside Steeplechase Park on Coney Island that sheltered park goers on a rainy day. It was our Crystal Palace. And Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father, tore it down in 1966 to build some condos that didn’t materialize.

The Pavilion of Fun was just one of the many glories that Coney Island, that strip of land on the outer reaches of Brooklyn, has housed in its 150 years of fame. Like some citadel city that has been sacked and burned repeatedly, the sands of Coney Island hold the traces or at least the memories of castles, ancient empires that have rose and fell, rose and fell. I imagine some future archeologist digging in its soil in centuries hence, finding the remnants of the Elephant Hotel, or Lilliputia, the city of midgets.

“At Coney Island, where the abiding talent is for the exaggerated and the superlative, the changes have been so violent and complete as to obliterate, each time, the memory of what was there before,” said Edo McCullough, the nephew of George C. Tilyou, who founded Steeplechase and built the Pavilion of Fun. “On one shorefront lot at Coney, for example, there has been in succession an untidy tangle of bathhouses, a vast casino, an arena in which were fought three world’s championships heavyweight prizefights, the most beautiful outdoor amusement park in the world, a freak show, a parking lot, and ‘- today — New York City’s brand-new aquarium.”

McCullough wrote this in 1957, before his uncle’s park and the Pavilion of Fun were torn down, before most of the cereal-box ranks of Corbusier-inspired apartments had replaced the low-rise bungalows and duplexes, before its amusement park district had shrunk to a few blocks.

Now, Coney Island is changing again. The city of New York has built on the boardwalk and beach a cute little single-A ballpark for a cute single-A farm team of the mighty Mets, the Brooklyn Cyclones. Housing a mere 6,500 people, it allows ball fans to watch the sand, the ocean and a rising young star belt a fat one all at the same time. Even more significant, although less hyped, is the complete rebuilding of the Coney Island subway station, where four separate lines terminate, and which once routinely dumped out a million people into Coney Island’s downtown on a hot summer’s day. Costing $250 million ‘ six times the $40 million cost of the ballpark’ the new subway station, to be completed in 2005, will have an airy canopy of steel and glass over a new building, platforms and tracks. The city is also spending $30 million to spruce up the boardwalk, build public bathrooms, and other beach-front details; $30 million on youth athletic facilities, and $10 million on old-style urban housing and retail along Mermaid Avenue, one of Coney Island’s principal urban thoroughfare.

The ballpark and all this new infrastructure may revive Coney Island. But in what style will be the island’s newest incarnation? Coney Island, once a clear urban grid of streets fed by subways, is now a patchwork-quilt of auto-oriented development built around parking lots and highways ‘ like a recent Home Depot that went up –mixed with old-style urban streets built around subways lines. Will new development be oriented around the sidewalks and the subway station, or around the parking lot and the highways? No one knows. Despite about $350 million in city spending, there is no master plan as to where and in what form development should go.

Ken Fisher, a Brooklyn city councilman and candidate for borough president, said there was no master plan, but there were plans to set up a non-profit development corporation to direct investment. Fisher uses the Times Square analogy, as do many believers in Coney Island’s potential revival. At some point, like the old-porn saturated Times Square, the dilapidated Coney Island will reach the tipping point, and new investment will flood in, Fisher said.

‘Everyone cherishes Coney Island’s past,’ Fisher said. ‘But they also can’t wait for its future.’

THE PAST
The history of Coney Island, like the history of all places, is a history of transportation. This barren strip of beach, never really an island but ‘a clitoral appendage at the mouth of New York’s natural harbor’ in Rem Koolhaas’s vivid words in Delirious New York, was ignored for two and a half centuries. Then about 1850, steamships began visiting the island from Manhattan, which prompted the development of several luxury hotels. In the 1870s, railroad lines were extended there, and then the hordes began. By the early 1900s Coney Island had three huge amusement parks ‘ Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland ‘ plus hundreds of other individual attractions, often illicit — that lined the streets. At one time, Coney Island had three horse tracks, plus numerous casinos. Coney Island was dubbed ‘Sodomy by the Sea.’ This period, from roughly 1870 to World War I, has obsessed novelists and other writers. It is the subject of Kevin Baker’s surrealistic 1999 novel, ‘Dreamland,’ named after the amusement park that burned down in 1911. You could go to Coney Island and visit China, Arabia, Africa and Hell. See a building catch fire. Ride mechanical horses around a full-size track. You could visit man-made mountains, lagoons and German villages. See human premature babies on display in an incubator. And oh yes, visit the moon, at Luna Park.

Between 1915 and 1919, the subway lines to Coney Island were completed. Soon, the traffic on an average summer Sunday went from 100,000 a day to 1 million. Ironically, the hordes had a morally cleansing effect on the island. Coney Island went from being ‘a city of sin,’ to being a family-oriented, safe resort. The casinos, whores and more extravagant displays of weirdness disappeared. It was a resort version of ‘eyes on the street.’ Sin could not survive under the gaze of such vast hordes. In the place of sin, you rode with your date on the Cyclone Roller coaster, built in 1927, or the Wonder Wheel, built in 1928. Both are still in business. A 1988 report by the Landmarks Preservation Commission smugly informs us that ‘most of these rides succeeded because they combined socially acceptable thrills with undertones of sexual intimacy.’

During the depression and World War II, with gasoline being rationed, Coney Island thrived. A nickel subway ride got you to the beach. But the post-war, frenzied embrace of new highways and new cars killed Coney Island.

Like Robert McNamara, Robert Moses seems to be ubiquitous in histories of the 1950s and 1960s, accumulating blame for every urban tragedy. You can throw in the death of Coney Island. It was Moses, the all powerful parks commissioner, who built Jones beach and Jones parkway, which siphoned off customers from Coney. In actual numbers, more people continued to visit Coney Island. But the people with money had cars, and they went to Jones Beach. ‘He put the kibosh on us,’ said Charles Tesoriero of Moses, former president of Coney Island Chamber of Commerce, in 1965 in ‘Another Time, Another World,’ an oral history taken down by Michael Paul Onorato, ‘No markers on the belt Parkway, no exit signs; it just by-passed us.’ Moses also got control of the beachfront, and encouraged bland parks to replace frenzied amusements. Koolhaas, in Delirious New York, said that for Moses, ‘Coney Island becomes ‘ again ‘ a testing ground for strategies intended ultimately for Manhattan.’

The combination of freeways, parks and projects almost urban renewed the old Coney Island out of existence. Luna Park, the second great amusement park, burned down in 1944. In 1946 on its site, the first high-rise housing project went up. Over the next three decades, into the early 1970s, vast ranks of tall towers, some of them housing projects, some of them middle class, were built on Coney Island. The city rips out many if not most of the traditional streets of low-rise apartments and homes.

Today, Coney Island has a fading resort strip, remnants of an old-style urban neighborhood, and ranks of high rise apartments, most of them low-income housing. It is this jumbled mix that the various improvements, if they prove to be that, will act upon.

THE BALLPARK
The sweaty fat man in the pink T-shirt and baseball cap walked into the construction trailer beside the Brooklyn Cyclone stadium, then on the verge of completion. ‘You got any merchandise?’ he asked, using the cognoscenti word for souvenirs. ‘I was hoping to get some merchandise before it all got sold out. You got pennants? Pins?’ Kevin O’Shea had come all the way from Staten Island, the other side of the city, just to buy souvenirs. He already had tickets. ‘It’s about time,’ O’Shea said about the new stadium. ‘I’ve been meaning to come over here.’ It is this kind of rabid fan intensity ‘ a remnant of the time when Brooklyn had the mighty Dodgers ‘ that has helped the new team sell out most of their season’s 247,000 seats for the season before a pitch had been thrown. Tickets cost a reasonable $6 to $10 a seat.

Even without the nostalgia for pro baseball in Brooklyn again, the appeal of the ballpark is easy to understand. It combines beach and baseball in a Zen-like, all-is-one experience. Sitting in the stands, you can see the blue ocean, white sand, the boardwalk filled with strolling people, the nearby amusement rides, and a baseball game, with just a few swivels of the head.

John Ingram, the lead architect on the stadium from Jack L. Gordon Architects in New York, said he did everything he could to bring the beach, the boardwalk and the resort ambiance into the stadium. While most arenas work to create a sense of enclosure, the Coney Island does the opposite. The bland, glass-fronted skyboxes were stacked in a pyramid behind home plate, rather than strung out along left and right fields, which would have obscured views. The bathrooms were placed at ground level to the sides, rather than near the outfield. The stadium has an entrance directly off the boardwalk. You can walk the hard-wood planks of the seaside boardwalk, turn, and walk directly to the stadium on a pathway made of identical wood, also laid diagonally, without changing elevation.

At night, the ballpark has a different dynamic. Rather than blend with the sun and sand, it merges with the lights of the amusement park nearby, and the general festive air of Coney Island at night. It does this principally though lighting. Surrounding the stadium are giant lollipop lights, each 120 feet high and topped with 30-foot circular neon lights. At night, these red, green and blue lights mesh with multi-colored lights put under the skyboxes, creating an enclosure of lights. When someone hits a home run, the lollipop lights spin in circles, mixing with the bright flashing lights from the amusement park a block away.

‘We were trying to get some of the colorful overlays of light and graphics that were associated with old Coney Island experience,’ Ingram said. But he said they rejected having an historical look to the ballpark. ‘This is Coney Island now. We are its future. We are the fresh new look on the block.’

The stadium’s 1,200-space parking lot, (it has another 900 spaces off site), are put to the side of the stadium, and are not visible from the stands. Although the minimizing of the parking visually is admirable, a larger question is why is the city spending money on parking, while also spending money to rebuild a subway station that sits a block from the park, and can handle a million people a day? No doubt the owner of the Brooklyn Cyclones want parking, but it may not be in the long-term interest of Coney Island. The old-new resort can develop more intensely as a subway oriented resort, rather than an automobile one.

THE SUBWAY
In 1997, Bilbao in Spain opened its new Guggenheim museum. Designed by Frank Gehry, its shiny, fluid, dramatic presence seemed to single-handedly revive this fading, Basque industrial city. Less noticed though, was that the $100 million museum was the capstone of a $1.2 billion urban redevelopment program, which included a new subway line, a refurbished train and streetcar system, a waterfront development plan, and a new airport. The shiny Guggenheim was simply the shiny bauble on top of a serious mound of infrastructure, which would do more in the long run to bring more jobs and residents to Bilbao.

In similar fashion, the Coney Island ballpark is the shiny bauble on top of some serious infrastructure work, which includes the $250 million subway station renovation, the construction of an urban row of shops and apartments called Mermaid Commons, and various beachfront improvements. While the ballpark got its picture in The New Yorker, the new subway facility is more important. Four separate lines ‘ The B, D, F, and N ‘ terminate at Coney Island, giving it immense capacity. Like Grand Central Station, the Coney Island stop was built with ramps instead of stairs, better to handle the vast crowds. As you stand in the station’s swelling mouth, where four ramps from four platforms from eight tracks exit, you can quickly visualize the crowds from past days. The ramps look like cattle chutes.

The new facility includes a new building, new tracks and platforms, new foundations for the elevated station, new signaling and a dramatic overhead canopy that will stretch across the open-air platforms. Despite the ambitious design, the project’s biggest challenge was figuring out a way to do the work and negotiating with the community about the work, said project officials. Originally, the job was going to take eight years, said Mike Kyriacou, design manager on the project with New York City Transit. But he and his staff figured out a way to do it in 42 months, although it means shutting some lines down for years at a time.

‘We had to go to the community, and say ‘We have to have you suffer for a while,’ Kyriacou said.

The present station is a wreck of crumbling concrete and rusted metal. It’s a sad testimony to the low priority given to maintenance in public infrastructure. ‘You go there, and you say, ‘Why the hell do we have such a thing?’ Kyriacou said. ‘The condition of the existing facility is so dilapidated. It’s looks like a place that no one has ever touched.’

The most visually striking component of the new station will be a gull-wing glass and steel canopy, equipped with solar photovoltaic grid to generate electricity. This will stretch across the four platforms, and because the eight tracks are elevated, should be visible from a considerable distance. Underneath the canopy will be new tracks, platforms, pilings and station. The solar system will produce the most electricity ‘ 150 kilowatts — on a hot summer day, precisely when air conditioners around the city are draining the centralized power system of Con Ed. Below the canopy and platforms will be a new, three-story, 34,000-square foot building that will replace the existing, crumbling one-story station. This station will include not only space for about 300 daily transit workers, but a new district 34 Police Station. The new station will manage to keep the mosaic fa’ade of the old station, which is landmarked. It will be removed, cleaned and rebuilt.

Andrew Berger, an architect at di Domenico + Partners in New York who designed the new three-story building, said he believed the new station would help renew Coney Island.

‘It’s all part of a bigger picture, which is that if you build it, they will come,’ Berger said. ”It’s a real opportunity to not only knit together an improved transit facility and police station, but hopefully leave a positive statement about future development opportunities out in Coney island.’

The renovation of the Coney Island’Stillwell Avenue stop should spur new development the same way a new highway creates more shopping malls and subdivisions. Of course, the $250 million renovation will not be creating more capacity. But appearances are important. Visitors and residents of Coney Island in a few years will enter a new, three-story building, lined with stores inside and out, then walk or roll up gently sloping ramps to wait for a train under a futuristic glass and steel canopy. Manhattan is infinitely more enticing, now that riding its subway is not about enduring graffiti, crime and crumbling stations.

In addition to the subway, there is about $70 million in other city-funded projects planned. They include the $10 million ‘Mermaid Commons’ of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Through a public-private partnership, the agency is building a series of infill buildings along 13 blocks of Mermaid Avenue, one of Coney Island’s principal urban streets. The project includes an entire block of three-story row houses, with retail below and apartments above, each selling for $274,000. The plan is to sell these to moderate income families, who will live on one floor, run a retail store, and rent out one apartment to another family.
ONWARD AND UPWARD
Standing on the Coney Island boardwalk at sunset, you see an amazing parade of people pass by: an Hasidic Jew in a black hat and long coat; some pudgy Latin children and their pudgy mother; a white haired man in a shirt and tie, speaking Russian to his grown son in blue jeans. Off to one side of the boardwalk in a park, a group of mostly Latins and blacks play handball.

Coney Island has always been a melting pot. The late novelist Joseph Heller, in his memoir Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, writes of the poor but thriving community of Jews, Italians and other ethnic groups of his youth in the 1920s. With a ballpark, a subway station, a renovated beach front — and most importantly, a rising economy in the New York region ‘ more people and money will come to Coney Island, and blend into the existing soup.

But many people are skeptical that better days are ever ahead. David Barstow of The New York Times, in a story June 9, 2000, spoke of how ‘the old-timers and tourists and politicians cling like rust to the distant fantasy that Coney Island will be what it once was, as if the great cultural and demographic tides that built and then laid waste to the place were merely boardwalk phantasms.’ He goes on to call the place, ‘a clich’ of seedy decay,’ and ‘charmless.’

But Barstow did not mention the plan to renovate the subway, apparently only aware of the new ballpark. Probably what threatens Coney Island now is getting too rich. If New York transit adds better express service to Manhattan, the island could be a half hour away from Wall Street. And as an amusement park, Coney Island is still not bad. Sitting in a rocking car on top of The Wonder Wheel, you can see the ball park and then, the elevated subway line that glides between the housing towers nearby. From this vantage point, the train looks like just another amusement park ride, perhaps one to try after the roller coaster. I suspect that more people will try that ride, in coming years, and come to Coney Island.

Alex Marshall, the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken, lives in New York City and is a frequent contributor to Metropolis Magazine.