[Author's Note: First, this was one of my earlier in-depth works so it is not as tightly written as I would have like it.  Secondly, any book covers are here only to show the reader the book itself.  The images of the covers are property of the publisher and should be respected as such.  If you wrote or published a book here and want the cover taken down please email me at asandy@depauw.edu]

            For years Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York was the place for the people of the Northeast to play.  Rich and poor, young and old, everyone came to Coney.  The people who visited between the late eighteen hundreds and 1911 saw Coney as the world.  It touched them in a way nothing else could.  Like all eras and locales in America Coney has a history as varied and interesting as the melting pot of people who played there for decades.           

          After over twenty books and documentaries Coney Island's complete story has still not been told so I will only attempt to give the reader a basic knowledge of the island’s history here.  New Yorkers started visiting Coney via a shell road during the 1830's and by the Civil War there were over a dozen hotels and bathhouses on the island.  During the 1870's the island began to be divided.  At the eastern end was Brighton Beach, where large hotels for New York's upper class went up.  At the western end of the island prostitution and three card monty players were abundant.[1]  Coney was run by a corrupt friend of Tammany Hall, John Y. McKane, who exclaimed, "Houses of prostitution are a necessity on Coney Island, and I don't plan to interfere with the gambling at Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay.  After all, this ain't no Sunday school."[2]  In 1894 McKane was imprisoned and the island exploded economically.  The visiting working-class families spread out between the two ends of the island at West Brighton, the area where the amusement capitol of the world later sprung up.  The roller coaster was invented there by a Sunday school teacher named LaMarcus Adna Thompson in 1884 and in 1897 Captain Paul Boyton opened a cluster of attractions and called it "Sea Lion Park." 

          In 1897 George C. Tilyou, a man who had grown up on Coney, opened Steeplechase Park.  It had a signature ride, the Steeplechase Horse Race, which was an undulating steel track that featured wooden horses on which the patrons rode around the park.  In 1903 Frederick Thompson and Elmer "Skip" Dundy bought Sea Lion Park from Boyton and opened Luna Park.[3]  The park was like nothing anyone had ever seen.  It featured over 250,000 electric lights and was hailed by one visitor as an "electric Eden."  Luna was an overnight success and enticed William H. Reynolds, a local politician.  He built Dreamland Park in 1904 and it featured a set of rides which conveyed morals of the day to patrons.  Dreamland only lasted until 1911 and was never as popular as the other two parks, but its one million lights completed a skyline unlike anyplace else on earth. The socialist writer Maxim Gorky said,

"With the advent of night a fantastic city of fire suddenly rises from the ocean into the sky.  Thousands of ruddy sparks glimmer in the darkness, limning in fine, sensitive outline on the black background of the sky, shapely towers of miraculous castles, palaces and temples.  Golden gossamer threads tremble in the air.  They intertwine in transparent, flaming patterns, which flutter and melt away in love with their own beauty mirrored in the waters.  Fabulous beyond conceiving, ineffably beautiful, is this fiery scintillation."[4]

             The historical writings about Coney can be divided into three main time periods.  The first is 1940-1970, the second is 1971-1984 and the third is 1985 through the present day.  The first histories are simple looks at Coney Island called Sodom by the Sea, by Oliver Pilat and Jo Ranson and Good Old Coney Island  by Edo McCullough.  They are collections of colorful stories about the place which do not go into much detail about the "whys" behind Coney's success.  The second time block sees a split in amusement park historical thought.  Robert Cartmell's The Incredible Scream Machine and Gary Kyriazi's The Great American Amusement Park  are newer looks which use similar writing styles to their predecessors.  John F. Kasson's Amusing The Million takes a new and different route and brings social history and sociology to the phenomenon known as Coney.  The third group features Judith A. Adams' The American Amusement Park Industry, which is primarily an economic history, Richard Snow's Coney Island: A Postcard Journey to the City of Fire and Richard Snow's & Ric Burns' "Coney Island" which look at Coney through a social historical perspective.

            By 1941 the "grand old Coney" slowly began its trek down the long road to economic ruin.  The end of the year saw America banding together to fight a common enemy of freedom and an economy surging for the first time in many years.  The end of 1941 ushered in a book called Sodom by the Sea, written by New York newsmen Oliver Pilat and Jo Ranson.  The book jacket says that, “(Pilat and Ranson) have pulled no punches in writing this, the first full-length history of New York’s Barbary Coast.”[5] The book covered a hundred years of history, beginning in 1830 and was written as the definitive history of the island.[6]  Although Coney was still running strong in the forties things had definitely begun to change since its heyday.  The thirties had seen a Luna Park which transformed from a world of magic into a run-down park of the Depression.  I think Pilat and Ranson saw that the place would probably never hold the power over people that it once had.  So, they attempted to write a book that captured the spirit of Coney in written form, something no one else had attempted outside of a magazine.             

          The other book of this era was Edo McCullough’s 1957 publication Good Old Coney Island.  His book was very similar to Pilat and Ranson’s because it told a local history to a national audience through stories arranged by topic, not by date of occurrence.   George C. Tilyou once said that, “Coney Island, between June and September, is the world.”[7]  This feeling is the one McCullough tries to invoke throughout his book and it is an emotion one feels when reading about the different aspects of Coney’s history.  Like the previous book this one attempts to do a complete history of the island starting towards the beginning of the Nineteenth century.  Although is also a good history of the place, one must not forget that it was written by George Tilyou’s nephew, so there is some bias involved as he talks about the business decisions his uncle made throughout his tenure as head of Steeplechase Park.

           



          "Sodom" and "Good Old" are almost interchangeable as historical works.  Their layouts, tones and stories are all quite similar yet the authors are coming from very different places.  Ranson and Pilat were coming from a journalistic background.  They viewed their goal as writing the first real history of Coney Island so they packed their book with facts, figures and antidotes from the island’s colorful history.  One good example is chapter five of Sodom by the Sea entitled “Amusement Parks”.  This section of the book deals with Coney’s most radical era from 1897-1911.  It is filled with stories about small things like the sign Tilyou erected after steeplechase burned down and how Thompson and Dundy  had only twelve dollars between them the night Luna opened for business.[8]  Edo McCullough’s goal appeared to be the antithesis of Pilat and Ransom’s.  While they were journalists assembling facts and stories from history, McCullough was a local historian who had collected so much Coney memorabilia that he decided to write a book.  This was a man who had literally grown up at Coney because his uncle ran Steeplechase Park.  His goal appears to be to sit and simply spin tales about the Coney that used to exist.  On the surface one would think that these books would be exact opposites and tell different stories.  But, upon close analysis they reveal almost identical histories of the place.  How could this happen?

          The content and layout of both Sodom by the Sea and Good Old Coney Island are quite similar.  Each author(s) chooses about ten incidents which are made into chapters to help tell the stories of Coney.  Each was written as a “definitive” history of Coney and they do manage to give the reader a lot of information.  The authors structure each story/chapter so that it not only tells of an event, but that it envelopes the reader in the time.  For instance, we do not only find out in McCullough’s chapter entitled “Spectacular” that on May 26, 1911 that Dreamland Park burned to the ground.[9]  We also find out about the lives and occurrences of all of the people affected by the fire.  The fire is the central theme of the chapter, but we also learn about a local man named Julius Frosin and his problems with renting land, how Memorial Day weekend was used as an economic gauge for the rest of the season and how a bucket of hot tar dropped in “Hell Gate” caused one of the most spectacular fires in the history of New York.[10]