I began to photograph Coney Island in 1977. I remember walking through the damp concrete of the old Stillwell Avenue subway station, passing by the terminal bar, that at the time seemed very threatening, the barstools host to strange personalities who seemed far removed from the kinds of people that one found in Manhattan, or even in Long Beach, the seaside town on Long Island where I grew up. The denizens of Coney Island were a bit threatening, and I couldn’t summon up the courage to stop and photograph in that bar, but I made a mental note of what I had seen, and in the mid-1980s, when I had established myself as a magazine photographer with Black Star, I returned to Coney Island to try to carve out my own small piece of photographic lore. It was a big, ambitious task, and I thought often of the many photographers who had preceded me at the Brooklyn beach, a fertile ground for snappers for decades.
The beach was the summer destination of the city’s working-class and poor residents, who, during a heat wave, poured off the subways by the thousands, pushing baby carriages, pulling coolers, children screaming as boom boxes blared and returned home in the evenings somewhat quieter, carrying huge stuffed animals won at the amusements off Stillwell, slumped over in exhaustion sleeping on each others shoulders, happy faces red from the sun. Mexicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Moslems, Hindus, Chinese, and African-American, they were the maids who cleaned the hotel rooms, the laborers who waited for daywork under the elevated subway in Queens, the men who sold flowers at the delicatessens of the Upper East Side, the nannies of Park Avenue families, the newly arrived, dropped down on the great jets that gracefully swooped in for landings at John F Kennedy International Airport, just over the bay from Coney Island. The noisy, ecstatic crowd that rode the Wonder Wheel each muggy summer night were the laborers that kept Manhattan functioning.
Here they mingled in the melting pot, and waded together in the tepid water, which on a busy July 4th weekend would be filled with shrieks and littered with napkins, paper plates, diapers, and the occasional “Coney Island Whitefish,” made famous in the Lou Reed song. When temperatures rose to the sticky heights of a New York City heat wave, beachgoers would find cool shelter under the boardwalk. That changed in 1994 when the Army Corps of Engineers, at the behest of the New York Police Department, pumped thousands of tons of sand into the space under the boardwalk, ostensibly to deter peeping toms. The police claimed that deviants hid under wooden planks and positioned themselves to look up ladies skirts, an ironic harkening back to the old Steeplechase Park, where one popular attraction featured air jets that blew up the skirts of unwitting passersby. As if the peeping toms were enough of a problem, a large homeless population had taken up residence under the boardwalk, installed a Port-a-San, and even working fax machine. Obviously, action had to be taken.
The filling in of the area under the boardwalk was only one part of a larger plan by the city to “clean-up” Coney Island, a plan that in 1994 led to the demolition of the Thunderbolt, a rickety historic wooden roller coaster that had become overgrown with weeds, and the construction of a family-friendly minor league baseball stadium nearby. The stadium was, and remains, the most concrete result of a 40-year cleanup effort that began in the 1960′s when the boardwalk’s biggest and most famous amusement park, Steeplechase Park, closed and subsequently burnt down. The area around the amusement parks had steadily gone down hill in the fifties, as landlords started to rent out the beachfront cottages year-round to an increasingly poorer population. Crime was rampant, and in the early sixties much of the neighborhood, primarily Italian and Jewish, migrated to safer parts of Brooklyn or Nassau County, which was expanding quickly.
Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was the first in a succession of entrepreneurs who lobbied the city, unsuccessfully, to remove zoning restrictions that barred residential development in the historic heart of Coney Island, the several square blocks around Surf Avenue and West 12th Street where America’s first nickel rides and freak shows bloomed. The construction of luxury condo towers and beachfront hotels were the goal for Trump and his successors. Each effort has been rebuffed, partly because Coney Island holds an almost mythic place in the pantheon of New York culture, an appeal that cuts across class, race and religion, and in part, defines the city. With huge changes occurring in the landscape of the city, from the renewal of Times Square, to the homogenization of the city’s neighborhoods, all of which are starting to look like each other, the boardwalk’s ramshackle old buildings and the honky tonk low-brow amusements they house remain one of the few references to a time before New York City had its own branding office, a time when NYC was more like the New York of old, even if the Himalaya Ride and the Hell-Hole bore only a vague resemblance to the grand attractions like Luna and Steeplechase Park which once defined Coney Island as a world-class beach resort.
It was this same threat of change, whether mistaken or not, that compelled me to document Coney. For almost eight years, I was at Coney Island every weekend, walking the sands and venturing into the sea with an assortment of cameras and my sneakers often tied together and hanging around my neck. I knew the Polaroid photographers, men who sold instant pictures to the beachgoers, by name. Some of them brought assistants dressed in costumes, to pose with the subjects. Others brought along huge snakes or tropical birds, I am not sure they really knew what I was up to, but they would always nod and smile, knowing that I was not really competition for them, and I would reciprocate similarly. At the end of the day I would reward myself with a hot dog from Nathan’s and maybe some caramel corn, and trudge back to the F train for the hour long trip back to 25th Street, the heat of a Manhattan summer still percolating up from the pavement. Eventually I shot every inch of Coney Island that I could find, and forced myself to reinvent my own photography there, as after awhile it seemed as though I had photographed everything possible once, and I had to find different ways of framing the same thing.
But the carnival atmosphere brought me back to Brooklyn time and time again, its relaxed informal atmosphere a complete contrast to the rush hour madness mentality of Manhattan, where construction cranes dotted the skyline in the construction boom of the 1990s, and the advent of cell phones meant that one had to share in the conversations of countless strangers who walked up the street, phones to their ears, screaming out details of their business machinations. Eventually the construction cranes got the best of my own West 25th Street neighhood, and with Manhattan beginning to look more and more like a great strip mall, with the requisite Home Depot, Outback Steakhouse, Starbucks, and other suburban chains appearing in what used to be distinct Manhattan neighborhoods, I left New York and Coney Island for New Orleans, which itself turned out to be a somewhat endangered environment, as evidenced by Hurricane Katrina, which followed shortly after. I suppose if I was going to leave the beach, then the beach was going to find me.
But a year ago, on one of my frequent trips back to New York I revisited Coney Island and good pictures came in short order. The headlines in fact hadn’t changed much, as yet another developer, Joe Sitt of Thor Equities was threatening to bulldoze the rides in favor of condos, as had Fred Trump and others before him. Once again though it appeared as if he would not be given the necessary zoning, rebuffed by the reality that the area is a cultural institution with meaning well beyond the clapboard buildings that appear as though they might fall down on their own, much less require demolition.
In part the universal appeal of the beach and the sea, an appeal that crosses cultures, from Hindu to Moslem, Jew to Catholic, in a city that is known for its international flavor, gives Coney Island a status that even the Hamptons might relish. It’s a place to which everyone can relate, and is often the first destination of new immigrants looking for a day holiday, often garbed in Hijab, saris, or simply the frumpy ankle-length skirts of the Lubavitchers, who swarm over Astroland every spring in their annual trip to the beach. When it comes to music, however, Coney Island dances to a distinctly Latin beat. Although Orchard Beach in the Bronx has drawn away some of the crowd, every Sunday afternoon in the summer there is a rumba on the boardwalk, complete with clanging cowbells, clave, and even an amplified keyboard. The strains of the rumba waft along the beach, where they blend with boom-boxes blaring rap, Dominican meringue, and Mexican pop music, all combining into a swirling world music mix, the exact composition of which changes according to just where on the crowded beach one happens to be standing or which way the sea breeze is blowing. All this provided a background to the hawkers that prowled the beach selling sticky cinnamon Mexican stick churros, t-shirts, mango slices, ice cream, and Budweiser beer, lots of it.
If any one beach can lay claim to being “the world’s beach,” it would seem as though Coney Island is that place. I hope that it remains that way.
Andy Levin