For many years, the famed beach and boardwalk was a strip of sand dunes, grass and wild rabbits. The Dutch named it Conyne Eylandt, or Rabbit Island, though its history is contested, and for 200 years it stayed barren. With the railroads reaching Coney Island in the 1860s it also brought the people, and suddenly the beach was bustling and naturally divided by class, with hotels lining the sealine on the East.

The rich went to Manhattan beach, the comfortable to Brighton, and everyone else to West Brighton, where a blossom of pleasure, sin and laughter filled the seas. Only a streetcar ride away from the city, Victorian manners were coming undone. Men and women bathed together, skin touched, and laughter spilled down the beach.

250,000 of the then 3 million New Yorkers could be found there on a Summer Sunday, and the beach was declared by the New York Times as “Sodom by The Sea”.

Next — II. A Price On Pleasure

Many don't know that Coney Island was one of the first places Americans could see electricity at a grand scale. With the turn of the century came more change, and replacing the sin on the sand were the entrepreneurs determined to put a price on pleasure. In 1895 came the first amusement park, and within the decade there were 3 more—Luna Park, Dreamland and Steeplechase.

Tilyou’s park, Steeplechase, was known for its ride of the same name, where, after couples rode on wooden horses (which was also shocking at the time), riders stepped off to a live audience where they became the spectacle. A small stream of air lifted women’s skirts, a clown shocked the men with electricity, and the crowds enjoyed it so much that they often had to turn all the lights off to clear the room for the next show.

Down the street, Dreamland park shone 1 million lightbulbs, with recreations of various wonders and countries from around the world. You could time travel to watch the world being created, or you could be circled in a whirlpool to simulate being sucked down into Hell. The country had never seen anything like it, and soon hundreds of thousands of people were participating in the first true experiment of American amusement and leisure.

Next — III. The Beacon Of The West

The Coney Island we see today is the result of destruction and rebuilding, over and over again. Coney Island has burned down over 6 times, the people's playground completely leveled and destroyed. Steeplechase burned in 1907, and two days later Tilyou put up a sign promising a bigger and better park, and charged ten cents to walk through the ruins. After that was Dreamland burning down in 1911, and Luna in 1944.

But Coney was always rebuilding, always in this perpetual competition with itself (or rather, among the tycoons who owned each competing park) to be the best, the brightest, the strangest, the biggest, the most grand. It was determined to be the beacon of the west. Before Freud could see his theory of the pleasure principle in action, Coney Island had already put it into practice.

Next — IV. The Coney of Yesterday

Perhaps it's for that reason that to this day, Coney is constantly stuck in a cycle of nostalgia. There are a few structures that are "original" though it's hard to say what “original” means. There is the Wonder Wheel from 1920, the parachute jump from 1939, and the Cyclone, the 100 year old wooden roller coaster. Everything else is memory and history, and you can ask any New Yorker and they’ll tell you about the Coney Island of their childhood, the one that was better and stranger. It’s a sentiment that’s been that way for as long as Coney has been around. Even in 1933, a newspaper ran a letter titled “Who remembers the Coney Island of forty years ago?”

There is a natural impulse to be caught in nostalgia’s grasp—to long for the way things used to be and mourn what never was. Forty years from now, someone will long for this Coney Island too: the alley of games on the Bowery, the packed Fourth of Julys, the snake charmers and the sign painters. Towels drying over the boardwalk railing that look like flags. Parents rinsing sandy feet in the water fountain. Tokens in a palm, a goldfish being won, the silent awe after a firework bursts. The rides, nearly a century old, that we still got to take. In nostalgia, there is always more layered underneath. This book shows Coney as I saw it: post pandemic, when the world was coming back into itself, and when a casino threatened its very existence.