Coney Island

“ Immediately recreation becomes less a question of search than of selection. One has simply to decide in what manner he prefers to be made uncomfortable, for it is Coney Island’s claim to celebrity that she is prepared to make you so in a variety of ways approaching infinity, and, if you are of the majority, you are there for that express purpose. If you are not of the majority, your wisest course is to return without delay by the way you came, and leave to more appreciative mortals your place on the Scenic Railway, and the Sliding Staircase, and the Loops, and the Chutes, and the Camel. ”

“ Nowhere on earth, perhaps, is to be found a more eloquent illustration of the doctrine that when we regard as martyrdom when it come to us as an enforced duty, we hail hilariously as a privilege when it is no longer a question of anything but free will. How lugubriously should we bemoan our fate had we to undergo, as a matter of necessity, the physical discomforts which, elevated to the dignity of recreations, Coney Island put within our eager reach at a trifling sum per jolt! ”

“ She was precisely the sort of person whom Coney Island must have pleased.
But it pleased Claire in a totally different way. The immense concourse of people who flocked thither, by such easy modes of travel, from New York and Brooklyn and elsewhere, were an incessant source of interest. Their numbers, their activities, their enjoyments, kept her blood in a soft tingle. This brilliant and picturesque city by the sea appeared to her in the light of a delicious reparation. It was a long, splendid festivity, compensating her for those years of dire dullness passed but a few miles away. ”

“ Coney Island is of no value to the fastidious or the lazy. Coney Island belongs to those who have the invaluable gift of knowing how to be foolish, who have felt the soul-purging quality of huge laughter, the revivifying power of play. Lawyers and pickpockets, speculators and laborers, poets and butchers, chorus girls and housewives at Coney Island find one common level in laughter. Every wholesome human being loves the clown.
Spent with laughing, Pen finally suggested lunch, and Jim led the way to an open-air restaurant. ”

“ It does seem too bad that one so young and—pardon me again—so beautiful should be robbed of life. But what brought you to Coney Island? What brought you here into this predicament? If your life is of value to others, what right had you to risk your neck in a captive balloon merely to experience the sensations of soaring? ”

“ Ramshackle booths, tents, shooting-galleries, carousels, acrobats, fortune-tellers, snake-charmers, lion tamers, ventriloquists, fat ladies, magicians, vendors of every imaginable cheap and tawdry thing—the old Coney Island multiplied by ten and invested with a Gallic lightness and sparkle in place of its own dull vulgarity. ”

“ But after a time the fickle taste of metropolitan New York seemed to change. New Yorkers did not seem to care quite as much for the gay creations of paint and tinsel, the eerie cities that were born anew each night in the glories of electric lighting. Fire came to Coney island—again and again. It scoured the paint and tinsel cities, thrust the highest of their towers, a blackened ruin, to the ground. Pious folk said that God was scourging Coney island for its contempt for His laws. ”

“ The tide of pleasure-loving humanity jostling against them had carried their feet to the “Lion Palace.” From there, seated at table and quenching their thirst with high-balls, they watched the feverish palpitations of the city's life-blood pulsating in the veins of Coney Island, to which they had drifted from Brighton Beach. ”

“ It was at Coney Island, that astonishing permanent and magnified Earl's Court Exhibition, summer Blackpool and August-Bank-Holiday-Hampstead-Heath, which New York supports for its beguilement. In this domain of switchbacks and chutes, merry-go-rounds and shooting-galleries, dancing-halls and witching waves, vociferous and crowded and lit by a million lamps, I came suddenly upon the Pig Slide and had a new conception of what quadrupeds can do for man. ”

“ Here is San Francisco's Little Coney Island, where the multitude comes on Sundays by motor car and trolley, with lunch baskets and children, to frolic or rest on the sands that front the sea.
Gay booths and kiosks skirt the Esplanade, where vendors are kept busy supplying their wares and where everyone appears as carefree as the gulls wheeling above the white breakers.
As you continue south along the beach you pass the chalet of the Olympic Club, whose members sally forth on New Year's Day for their dip in the surf. ”

“ SURF-BATHING AT CONEY ISLAND. Coney Island, about eight miles from the city of New York, is four and a half miles long and about half a mile in width. It is quite a resort in summer for those who want to breathe the briny air of the ocean.
Charles and Laura had long been promised a visit to this famous bathing-place, and one warm day in June their father drove them down to the island; for there is a bridge connecting it with the main land.
As they drove along the beach, they saw the bathers in [14] the water, and Charles was very desirous of having a dip in the salt sea himself ”

“ But however that may be, its wonderful development as a summer resort has only come since the Civil War. It has a hard and gently-sloping beach facing the Atlantic, and can be so easily and cheaply reached, by so many routes on land and water, that it is no wonder, on hot afternoons and holidays, the people of New York and Brooklyn go down there by the hundreds of thousands. Coney Island is about five miles long, and from a quarter-mile to a mile in width, being separated from the adjacent low-lying mainland only by a little crooked creek and some lagoons. ”

“ For Coney Island, unlike other resorts of its type, loses rather than gains by the fall of night. The pace has been so swift, the excitement of the long hot day so intense, that a more than mortal energy would be required to maintain the original level of enthusiasm. ”

“ Coney Island is indeed an institution.
Along the sea front of the bank for some three or four miles there has been constructed an esplanade lined 126 with seats, and defended from the sea by a stone wall. Outside there is a belt of shingle on which the surf breaks, but not violently, unless in bad weather. Large bathing establishments, with every appliance, are placed at convenient intervals along the shore. Here in the season tens of thousands of people may be seen, all properly and decently attired, disporting in the waves. ”

“ Arriving at Coney Island beach, though a storm is coming on, we light our interior and in the dusk are about to drop into the sea. A shout goes up outside and strong hands hold us. Near us is a carriage whose horses we had frightened. ”

“ CONEY ISLAND’S CODE OF ETIQUETTE.
Therefore let us “loop the loop,” “shoot the chutes,” and do whatever other alliterative and acrobatic things the Isle of Idiocy provides—if there be no interference on the part of the police, those vigilant custodians of New York’s health and morals, who have of late demonstrated an unaccountable interest in some of the island’s most popular amusements. If there be girls on the front seats of our convulsively careering car, so much the better for them. They have something to fall back upon. ”

“ The Gay White Way with its stupendous blaze of lights, and Coney Island, with its fear-stimulating roller coasters and chute-the-chutes, are characteristic by-products of an age that has renounced the task of actively humanizing the machine, and of creating an environment in which all the fruitful impulses of the community may be expressed. The movies, the White Ways, and the Coney Islands, which almost every American city boasts in some form or other, are means of giving jaded and throttled people the sensations of living without the direct experience of life—a sort of spiritual masturbation. ”

“ Every kind of sailing boat, canoes, and yachts, as well as motor and steam launches, may be seen riding the waves. The island itself is utilised in much the same fashion as Coney Island in the New York harbour, as a resort for popular amusement. With this inland sea of Lake Ontario at its doors, with its fine architecture, its development and culture of the arts, professions, and industries; with such picturesque treasure as that of the Rosedale ravines, the Humber valley, the Don River, and the gentle hills, Toronto is well calculated to be one of the embodied inspirations of the Dominion. ”

“ My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and he will be heard from next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a new “attraction” there, he informed me, offering kingly diversion. And then his conversation rang along parallels of latitude and longitude. He took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino cherry in a table d’hôte grape fruit. ”

“ Pretty much all routes through Brooklyn, as already indicated, lead to Coney Island, the barren strip of white sand, clinging to the southern edge of Long Island, about ten miles from New York, which is the objective point of the populace when in sweltering summer weather they crave a breath of sea air. The antiquarians of the island insist that it was the earliest portion of these adjacent coasts discovered, and tell how Verrazani came along about 1529 and found this sand-strip, and how Hudson, nearly a century later, held conferences with the Indians on the island. ”

“ See how it sparkles! It is the little old man of the forest who has thus rewarded you for your goodness. Now, thanks to him, we are rich; but we will never forget the poor and the sick in their sorrow."
WONDERS OF CONEY ISLAND. BY A. W. ROBERTS.
Fig. 1.—Sertularia.
If grown-up folks and young people who are desirous of becoming acquainted with the marine wonder-land of Coney Island will take a stroll along the beach, starting from the Iron Tower and proceeding a mile toward Norton's Point, I'll promise them that their constant exclamations will be, "I wonder what it is!" ”

“ O Coney Island, thou art the weary citizen’s heaven—
A heaven to dine, not die in, joyful and restful and clamful.
Better one hour of thee than an age of Atlantic City!
H. C. Bunner.
[294]
THE FONT IN THE FOREST
THERE’S a prim little pond
At the back of Beyond,
And its waters are over your ears;
It’s a sort of a tarn
Behind Robin Hood’s barn,
Where the fish live a million years.
And the mortals who drink
At its pebbly brink
Are immediately changed into mullets,
Whose heads grow immense
At their bodies’ expense,
And whose eyes become bulbous as bullets. ”

“ The schedule time of the Coney Island walk, for the novice squad, to be completed before noon, was about two hours and a half. And the average New Yorker, who regards a long sleep and a good breakfast on Sunday mornings as his inalienable rights, gazed gloomily at these items, and then turned to an account of a murder or a break in the stockmarket, anything in fact radiating a more cheerful influence. Even the enthusiastic golfer sighed to himself as he thanked God that he was not as some other man. ”

“ Spring, whose coming the breeze had heralded to Wally as he smoked upon the roof, floated graciously upon New York two mornings later. The city awoke to a day of blue and gold and to a sense of hard times over and good times to come. In a million homes, a million young men thought of sunny afternoons at the Polo Grounds; a million young women of long summer Sundays by the crowded waves of Coney Island. ”

“ At this moment Captain Dodge approached.
“We’ve got to anchor, boys,” he said. “The wind is dead ahead of us here in the narrows and I think I’ll wait till it shifts.”
“We might all go to Coney Island then,” exclaimed Fred Button eagerly.
“And the wind might change almost any minute and we’d sail off and leave you behind,” laughed Captain Dodge. “Coney Island is just around that point, though, and you could row there in a little while.”
“I guess we’ll stay aboard if you’re thinking of leaving us,” said Fred. “I’d rather go to Buenos Aires than Coney Island.” ”

“ Soon it was known that Coney Island, Rockaway, and all the seaside places along the south shore of Long Island were under water. The mighty current poured in through the Narrows with the velocity of a mill-race. The Hudson, set backward on its course, rushed northward with a raging bore at its head that swelled higher until it licked the feet of the rock chimneys of the Palisades.
But when the terror inspired by this sudden invasion from the sea was at its height there came unexpected relief. The water began to fall more rapidly than it had risen. ”

“ If Coney Island, with its noise and manufactured stimulations, is representative of the city, White's "Natural History of Selborne" is a characteristic product of the wealth of the country to the mind gifted with penetrating skill. ”

“ But when I heard that Coney Island was like a kind of glorified Margate (which I've never been to, but only heard about) with switchbacks and all sorts of shows, I said that Mother would consider it a chapter in the liberal education of a respectable British tourist; and it was decided that we should dine there. ”

“ I remained in the last evening to rest, while Coonskin and Barley took a trip to Burlington Beach, a famous local watering place.
"Wese taught, yuse see," said my little courier, in the morning, "dat it was something like Coney Island; so it's bein' only ten cents round trip dare, wese takes de trolley an' goes down.
"Well, yuse oughter seen de place. Before wese gets dare it begins to smell—why, Coney Island ain't in it fer smells. ”

“ And drive we did, to the wonderful Pali, or precipice, some miles back of Honolulu, and to the beautiful beach at Waikiki, where Dan and Oliver took a bath, while I laid back in a swinging seat under an awning and watched the goings and comings of the people at this Coney Island of Hawaii. "This doesn't look much like a savage country," I thought. ”