The "New" Coney Island

My wife and I, along with a friend, went to visit the "new" Coney Island a couple of weekends ago. We enjoy its urban, hot weather atmosphere, and find it a source of photographic subjects. I even felt inspired to shoot a bit, mostly attempts at impromptu portraits, such as the Asian woman milling around the fringe of an amateur variety show on the boardwalk.

One gets a sense of the "old" Coney Island in the "How Much" photo (not taken by any of the three of us). Our search for the "old" Coney Island uncovered a mixed bag of holdover goofiness and rather sanitized rides. The majority of visitors to Coney Island remain poor people, recently arrived immigrants, and misfits. Fortunately, their beach, boardwalk, and amusement park behavior tends to be raw, blunt, and uninhibited. This melange gives the area an appealing vitality, a quality lacking among beach communities catering to "nice people."

Unfortunately, our observations of Coney Island don't lend themselves to an optimistic outlook for New York City's marquee beach destination. Why? The city government's intention with Coney Island seems clear enough: get rid of just enough funk to make it palatable to sell to hotels, "luxury" condominium developers, and colorless chain restaurants. Even Robert Moses, whose zeal for middle-class suburban expansion did so much to shape the city, would not have gone this far. Then again, he considered Coney Island a distant, almost useless outpost -- a principal reason why he moved the New York Aquarium from Battery Park to the city's oceanfront. The fish didn't mind the move.

Ironically, Moses' spiteful banishment of the Aquarium ultimately helped the facility retain a certain unglossy character. The Aquarium's dull structure and very placement in the middle of nowhere ensured its avoidance of the city's "classist cleansing" efforts, an unofficial campaign that has transformed Manhattan south of 96th Street into America's version of a European bourgeois capital. The Aquarium remains a place where New Yorkers -- not tourists or MSM looking for "iconic" structures for TV consumption -- take their kids for closeup looks at the marine life presumably steps away in the Atlantic Ocean.

However, powerful commercial forces see gold along Surf Avenue. While one can hope and push for Coney Island to keep its funky soul, the financial forces coming to bear on the area may be too powerful to resist. It's like trying to stop the tides.