coney island: in memoriam

The amusement park at Coney Island was closed forever this weekend. (Story here.)

Coney Island figures in my childhood memories in a one-off way ... as you will read below, in a story that originally ran (in a somewhat altered version) in the Continental Airlines inflight magazine a few years ago.

My Coney Island memories

Grandma Annie came from a family of vaudevillians and brought theatrical flair to the bedtime stories she told my brother and me about Coney Island. Sitting on a straight-back chair placed between our beds, she would tell us about how riders would sit thigh-to-thigh on tiny seats on the Parachute Drop, to be pulled slooooowly up, up, up into the air and then – she would let out a great WHOOP! at this point in the story – free-fall hundreds of feet before cables caught and lowered them gently to the ground.

When Grandma Annie told us about a funhouse mechanical woman called Laffing Sal, she did her Laffing Sal imitation, rocking forward and back in her chair, hands in the air, hooting with laughter.

It was absolutely terrifying.

I don’t blame Grandma Annie, but in my 22 years living in New York City, I never once visited Coney Island. I grew up in Manhattan in the 1960s, when Coney Island was derelict, dangerous, gang-ridden, and seemingly on its last go-around. About the time Grandma Annie was giving me nightmares, Steeplechase Park – once a star attraction -- was closed and demolished. The Parachute Drop remained standing and the famous Cyclone roller coaster still rattled around its wooden track, but I never saw them. It wasn’t until I had lived away from the city as long as I’d lived in it that I finally made a pilgrimage to the south shore of Brooklyn during a holiday in New York.

Actually, I made two pilgrimages within a week of each other.

The first was with my husband on muggy, drizzly late spring Monday morning. The newly renovated Stillwell Avenue subway station – the end of the line for the F, Q, D, B and N trains – had just reopened but still was not quite complete. The sidewalk outside the station was an ugly landscape of cracked concrete and puddles of nefarious urban slime.

Nathan’s Famous – the original location of the well-known wiener stand -- was open, but the hour was too early for a hot dog, regardless of its historic significance. Most attractions were closed. The boardwalk was nearly deserted. A few families braved the damp sand of the beach but the Atlantic looked grey and uninviting. A smell that could excite only seagulls lingered over the scene.

My husband and I glanced around, made a couple of desultory stops in souvenir shops, watched the Cyclone clatter empty over its track a few times, and then beat it to more welcoming environs. Now, on top of the creepy memories I’d carried since childhood, I had a depressing image of Coney Island as dank and desolate.

Fortunately – surprisingly -- I didn’t give up. About a week later, I returned to Coney Island with a friend for Captain Bob’s Coney Island Tour. This time, it was a sunny Sunday afternoon.

And everything was different.

The lines were long at Nathan’s, where Captain Bob’s tours assemble. Captain Bob (a k a Robert McCoy), is tanned and craggy with a shock of white hair under his captain’s hat. He wore a red and white striped shirt a photographer’s vest and a handmade button decorated with the insanely grinning face that represented George Tilyou’s legendary, long-gone Steeplechase Park and has lived on to represent Coney Island.


Captain Bob grew up on Coney Island in the 40s and 50s and enjoyed all the park has to offer – almost. “We didn’t go to the beach. There were monsters in the water and things,” he said with a chuckle.

Before we started the tour in earnest, he warned us, “Some of the locals that come up to us during the tours are very much out of their minds. But very nice.”

Captain Bob is a local institution. He has led Coney Island’s kooky and increasingly famous annual Mermaid Parade as King Neptune – an honor that has also since been bestowed on celebrities such as David Byrne and Moby. He’s also competed a few times in the annual July 4th hot dog eating contest, although not anymore, since conceding that he could never keep up with the heavy eaters such as current and longstanding Takeru Kobayashi of Japan, who won in 2005 by wolfing 49 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes.

Although Coney Island still attracts sunbathers, roller coaster riders and hot dog eaters, a tour today of its greater glories is an exercise in imagination because so much of what made it an amusement dreamland extraordinaire is long gone. On his tours, Captain Bob provides memories for those of us who never experienced Coney Island in its heyday. His tour is a mixture of history lesson seasoned with personal reminiscences shared in endearing Brooklynese.

He described Luna Park – an elaborate hallucination of towers, minarets and so many lights that ships navigated by its glow – which burned down in 1944. Once Coney Island had 35 carousels and 28 roller coasters (all at once!), but the number has now dwindled to just one of each. The flea circuses that wowed the crowds of the past are gone, but Captain Bob led our group to fellow selling hermit crabs in whimsically decorated shells. “Not too far from flea circuses, eh?” he asked with a triumphant grin. And at the Coney Island Circus Sideshow on Surf Avenue and West 12th, a crowd gathered while barker urged them to step inside to see a fire eater, a contortionist, a tattooed man (hardly the novelty it once was) and other proud “Freaks, wonders and human curiosities!”


After Captain Bob efficiently ran through the history Nathan’s (Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor loaned Nathan Handwerker $300 to open the stand in 1916, and Brooklyn babe Clara Bow once worked the counter at Nathan’s) we paused on the boardwalk where he reached into a tattered envelope he carried and passed around vintage postcards to help us imagine scenes of yesteryear: The boardwalk a mass of happy people, beaches so crowded that each bather could count on only inches of real estate, the glow and excess of Luna Park, the thrills and practical jokes of George Tilyou’s madcap Steeplechase Park.

Nearby, kibitzers at a round plastic table outside a fried clam concession stand cheered Captain Bob. He gave a friendly wave to these beer-drinking locals exposing big sun-browned bellies to the breeze, but compared to these guys, he’s a serious working stiff with no time for idle chatter.



As we strolled the boardwalk, past holidaymakers wreathed in the scent of suntan lotion, Captain Bob reminisced about Steeplechase Park. It was easy to imagine him as a young boy dazzled by its raucous bells and whistles. The amusement park’s signature horse race ride -- mechanical horses running on guide rails -- ended with riders disembarking to brave Blowhole Theater, where puffs of air blew women’s dresses up and men were chased by a clown with an electric paddle while spectators roared. “My face hurt from laughing sometimes at Steeplechase,” Captain Bob recalled in a nostalgic reverie.


The Parachute Drop was saved from decay by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and, while no longer functional, it underwent a $5 million restoration and now looms over the new minor league Brooklyn Cyclones' KeySpan Park.

Ride on that thing?, I thought as I looked up at the 250-foot tower. No way, Grandma Annie.

We wandered with the Captain through Astroland, where a barker urged us to “Win your honey a bunny, a teddy bear for your love affair,” and tykes gleefully rang the bells on a little boat carousel that has thrilled toddlers for 60 years. We gazed up at the 84-year-old Deno’s Wonder Wheel, and finished the tour laughing at the panicky shrieks from the Cyclone, which has rattled the brains of the brave and devoted since 1927. (If I were a roller coaster type of person I’m sure I’d have ridden it, but I find coasters as terrifying as Laffing Sal and so I just watched.)



By the end of the tour, I’d recovered from my Coney Island phobia. My friend and I saluted Captain Bob, who rushed off to where another group was gathering for his next tour, and then celebrated the day with a Nathan’s Famous and fries before wandering a little more, finding further remnants of Coney Island’s past in battered sidewalk mosaics from the long-gone Seven Seas Oyster Bar. “Dere’s even beddah ones around da cawna,” a passerby advised – and he was right.

Oh yes – I did ask Captain Bob about Laffing Sal, but he didn’t remember her. Just as well, I suppose. I don’t think Grandma Annie meant to traumatize me, but I’m relieved that her scary memories of Coney Island’s past have been replaced by Captain Bob’s pleasanter ones. And now I have Coney Island memories of my own.

Captain Bob's Historic Coney Island Tour 2006 is every Saturday and Sunday, rain or shine, year ‘round. Meet at Nathan's famous Hot Dog Stand, Stillwell Ave. and Surf Ave. at noon or 2 p.m. $12 per person, Captain Bob (718) 907 0315