Coney Island: The People’s Playground

By Michael Immerso.
2002;208 pp., 26 color and 89 b&w illus;
$29.95, 0-8135-3138-1

Reviewed by Michael Punt

mpunt@easynet.co.uk

In 1928 director Paul Fejos made Lonesome, a film about a young man and woman who each leave the squalid and congestion of turn of the century New York, meet by chance as strangers in Luna Park, Coney Island, fall in love in a whirl of heady excitement on spectacular rides, loose each other and return to their loneliness only for us to discover that their dingy little rooms are in the same block. Fejos, a former air ace, was working in the Chicago studios and invented a crane that travelled at a speed of 60ft per second in order to intoxicate us with visions of the sweeps and rushes of the rides. There is also a brilliant if rather historically dubious film by Ric Burns which uses archive photographs and film footage to give an impression of the extraordinary spectacle of Coney Island as the safety valve of an overcrowded polyglot New York in the height of summer simply throwing off any cultural identity and inhibitions. Finally, John F. Kasson’s book, Amusing the Millions, and David Nasaw’s Going Out: the Rise and Fall of Public Amusement provide astonishingly vivid histories so that Coney Island’s amusement parks appear to be an exotic and terrifying experience for which we have no equivalent. Their wealth of material mirrors the excess of pleasure and knowledge that typified the era.

Michael Immerso’s new history Coney Island, the people’s playground is a more sober and static affair which acknowledges these and a number of other bibliographic sources and repeats much of what is in them. The book is illustrated with photographs from a number of public sources and some rather wonderful examples from his own collection. The chapters are divided chronologically and, not surprisingly the greatest emphasis is on the period between 1876 and 1920. This really marked the period when amusement parks and picnic groves were popular all over the USA as new habits of travel and leisure took urban dwellers out of the city for recreation and abandonment. Coney Island at the turn of the century, however, was special, its quality arose from its proximity to an astonishing city that saw (and accommodated) over 14 million immigrants in the course of as many years. What these immigrants used Coney for was as complex and diverse as the uses they made of nickelodeons, taverns, churches, summer schools, night classes newspapers, department stores, billboards, operas, advertisements and the host of diverting and uplifting sights that distinguished New York from the misery and persecution that they had left behind. Hedonist and infantile as the park may appear on the surface it was also the text book for the future where ordinary people both engaged with and critically rejected aspects of the life they had been thrust into.

Something of that specialness comes through the photographs that Immerso has brought together, as does the sense of breathtaking wonder that Coney Island amusement parks must have engendered. But these parks were about spectacle, movement, and excess, and contrasted with the frantic crane shots and fast cutting of Fejos, and the moving images Immerso, not surprisingly does not come off very well. Where Kasson and Nasaw score, however, is that the way that they write their history and reference it animates the past as a story to be retold by a new generation of curious people. In contrast, whilst Immerso’s book is loaded with detail and boasts 187 numbered endnotes, none are marked in the text and history becomes ossified in a textual catacomb. Similarly frustrating is the inconsistent dating of the photographs and the presentation of the bibliography in the acknowledgements thus rendering it incomplete and unusable.

These are sad omissions from a book which has been well researched and had the potential of bringing to life some of the feverish excitement that technology inspired a century ago: an excitement which is partially matched by our own fascinations with the new. With big pages and wide leading Coney Island, the people’s playground is undoubtedly marketed as a ‘coffee table’ book (if such tables still exist) and as such perhaps footnotes, bibliographies, and dates are regarded by the marketeers as negative box office. It is a pity, in the UK television historians now command huge fees: history is big business, people want to play with it. Part of the explanation for this enthusiasm for what used to be one of the least popular subjects in the school curriculum, lies in the availability of further information which is only a click away in the internet empowered household. The great entertainers who developed amusement parks at Coney Island - Tilyou, Thompson and Dundy, Reynolds, and so forth seemed to intuit that amusement is learning without the benefit of market research. Their parks attracted massive crowds not simply because of the thrills and spills, but because they were relevant to the intellectual aspirations of a public who were, above all, insatiably curios about everything in the new world around them. They recognised that the public were active and discerning in their use of pleasure and made their fortunes in proportion to the care that they paid to design and detail balancing delight and knowledge. Let us hope that, if Coney Island, the people’s playground is reprinted, Immerso’s research will be properly represented in order to meet the people’s fascination with reconstructing their own past.