Enjoying Coney Island While It's Still There

My wife, the photographer Amy Becker, and I visited one of our favorite New York destinations -- Coney Island -- yesterday. It was an ideal time to visit, with the weather reasonably, rather than unbearably, warm. Recent rains briefly cleaned New York's polluted sky, making the sea breezes and salty tang in the air that much more inviting. People dancing on the boardwalk were loose, rhythmic, and not trying too hard to have a good time. We were far away from political nuttiness and fiscal fecklessness, at least for a day. The scene felt good.

Unfortunately, the forces of "progress" have Coney Island in its sights. Plans exist to turn the beachfront into a homogenized hotel/condo zone. This year, the City of New York trial ballooned the notion of using concrete rather than wood on the boardwalk's surface. City spokespeople maintained cement would be safer and cheaper than screwed boards. The comments did put into focus just how much the money mattered more than any other consideration.

One wonders if Coney Island will share Times Square's fate. Many years ago, the "Crossroads of the World" was sanitized and morphed into a backdrop for morning television programs. Coney Island's carny personality would not survive a "Times Square" treatment. That would be a significant loss for all of us.

Walking through Coney Island yesterday suggested that the unwelcome process of "development" had already made significant inroads into the area. The amusement park looked wholesome, lacking the Casbah atmosphere it had as recently as two years ago. It is as if the equivalent of a Baron Haussmann transformed Coney Island's narrow alleys and funky streets into clean, easily managed, strangely charmless thoroughfares. Coney Island's poetry became harder to identify, but the sales fulcrum was all too easy to see.

That's a shame. For the price of a subway ride, New Yorkers have free beach access, an historic boardwalk, and an amusement park available to them at Coney Island. New York's iconic beach destination also serves as a reminder that New York faces the Atlantic Ocean, a fact not at all evident in Times Square. Most significantly, New Yorkers from those countries the Atlantic touches --such as Ireland, Morocco, Senegal, and Brazil, just to name four -- can freely mingle at Coney Island. They can dance, drink, get goofy, work on a tan, or enjoy the sea's benign aspects. In fact, the very lack of rules at Coney Island reminds one of what once made New York great -- its disdain of boundaries, its ethos of enjoying the moment, its atmosphere of expectation, its moments of tolerance. In contrast, contemporary New York feels much too calculated, and it's just too expensive in the Big Apple to attempt anything involving risk (except Wall Street's hunger for risking other peoples' money). The consequences are notable in the arts, in which more and more energy and ideas are originating beyond Gotham, while New York arts events seem more like oppressive coronations than exciting, ground-breaking adventures.

Ishmael Reed, in his new novel Juice!, compared Manhattan to a Disneyland marked with recurring episodes of what he characterized as "ethnic cleansing" (such as the migration of poor minorities from the Lower East Side and their replacement with prosperous classists). One gets an ominous feeling that the same destiny awaits Coney Island's beachfront. As my wife took photographs of the here-and-now Coney Island, we reflected that many structures from only a couple of years ago had vanished. Her photographs this weekend were taken with a sense of urgency. We both acknowledged that, next year, Coney Island might lose more of its outsider personality. The only unchanging aspect, which soulless developers cannot expunge, will be the ocean and its musical, eternal rhythm.

The photograph above, which my wife took yesterday at Coney Island, shows me wearing a "Bee Positive" shirt.