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Coney Island is a unique and vital part of how we think of New York City.
Business or Pleasure?
Colson Whitehead acknowledges this by attributing a section to it in The Colossus of New York, a collection of vignettes about the city.
Other than his personal musings on the collective experience of going to the beach and amusement park, I found the most valuable and provocative sections of Whitehead's writing to be his use of metaphor and abstraction. At the end of the Coney Island chapter, Whitehead writes:
"Citizens of this new vertiginous city. Up and down. Reel this way and the ocean is upon you in a wave, in beckoning gloom, reel the other way and slam into highrises, into broad brickfaces. A rollercoaster is your mind trying to reconcile two contradictory propositions. Earth and space, cement and air, city and sea. Life and death. Choose quickly. The city and the sea don't get along, never have. Two trash-talking combatants, two old bitter foes."
This passage sheds light on the relationship between Coney Island and Manhattan, and the mental state of New Yorkers who are torn between the two opposing forces. In his book Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Rem Koolhaas writes about Coney Island, "a resort implies the presence, not too far away, of a reservoir of people existing under conditions that require them to escape occasionally to recover their equilibrium."
This connection alludes to the interdependence between Coney Island and Manhattan. In a sense, neither would exist as efficiently without the other. Hardworking middle class Manhattanites, at least in the early days, required Coney Island as a destination for recreational escapism for the masses. In return, Coney Island's existence as a leisure center depends on the existence of a large New York City working force in need of recreation. Coney Island is a symbolic projection of Manhattan's dreams, wishes, and shortcomings. New Yorkers exist in the tension between the dichotomy of city and sea; Manhattan's Progress and Coney Island's Pleasure.
I was born in Coney Island Hospital, which was originally founded as a first aid center for beach goers in the late 1800s. The earliest, most innocent years of my life were spent living a mere 15 minutes from Astroland, the Cyclone, and Brighton Beach. As a child I would visit carnivals and the New York Aquarium in Coney Island. I have vivid memories of feeding seagulls on the boardwalk and riding waves in the Atlantic. Moving to Manhattan at age 8 was a physical split from Coney Island, but also a symbolic progression. What laid ahead was growth and concrete, what was left behind were memories and carefreeness.
