The subjects each of these authors chose to cover also shows the large time period they wanted to study.  Because these books were written while Coney still physically existed the authors felt it necessary to write histories which covered over a hundred years.  Both books feature very in-depth chapters that talk about the island’s pioneer days which lasted from the 1850’s through the 1880’s.  McCullough’s chapter entitled "Rapscallion" examines at one of the island's most influential early rulers, John Y. McKane, and the way he manipulated the money and votes of the people.  Both books also spend a lot of time talking about how the island's earlier history with in-depth chapters on horse racing, freak shows and the rigged politics which were a staple on the island until McKane's 1894 imprisonment.  These histories, unlike later ones, focus on the era before the amusement parks as much as the period of the great parks themselves.  These books are really the first and last to do close analysis of events before 1884.  My guess is that these authors saw Coney impacting people in different ways throughout time.  They saw the Oriental Hotel and the upper-class it represented and the racetracks and their lower-class clientele both as necessary parts of Coney's history.  Through their books these authors tried to give the most inclusive and conclusive history of Coney they could produce.

Coney was forgotten in the minds of Americas as the century wore on.  Steeplechase Park closed in 1964 and was torn down the following year.  American amusement parks in general were thought to be a lost cause until the late 1960's.  Some amusement parks became little more than dirty midways with unsafe rides at either end because of financial problems and rising insurance costs.  During the sixties and early seventies many corporate sponsors began to invest in them.  These new groups of theme parks like Six Flags, Anheuser-Busch's "Busch Gardens" parks, Taft's "King's" parks and the Marriott's "Great America" parks took Disney's idea of a theme park in a different direction.  They built parks which were family oriented but also had a high number of thrill rides and roller coasters.  Roller coasters like the Racer at King's Island and the Great American Scream Machine at Six Flags over Georgia became signature rides for these parks and brought the idea of the amusement park back into the minds of Americans. 

The year 1976 ushered America's bicentennial and the second group of historians who examined at Coney Island.  The first work was The Great American Amusement Parks, by Gary Kyriazi, which looked at America's love of amusement parks since the 1890's.  It had a large chapter on Coney Island towards the beginning of the book which gave a good picture of the parks from 1884-1911.  Another similar book written during this era was Dr. Robert Cartmell's 1984 work The Incredible Scream Machine, which was a history of the roller coaster.  He too had a chapter early in the book which discussed Coney and how it affected the development of the modern amusement park.  Both books brought in elements of teleology and said that Coney was the primary reason “present” amusement parks advanced as much as they had.

          Although these books were written eight years apart both of their chapters about Coney were very similar.  Each has large pictures which show how beautiful the parks were, pictures of the Steeplechase ride, maps of the parks and shots which show the endless grottos and canals which were illuminated by the island’s two million lights.  Both talked about items which made Coney unique, like the experience of the Steeplechase ride, Thompson and Dundy's "Trip to the Moon," and how Dreamland's tower was modeled after one in Seville, Spain.[1]  Besides the pictures Kyriazi uses numbers to impress. He doles out facts about everything, from the number of dancers which could fit on the Iron Pier to the number of lightbulbs in every amusement park.  He also takes his time to list all of the rides which appeared in both Luna and Dreamland in an attempt to dazzle readers who had probably never experienced Coney Island first-hand at any point in their lives.[2]       

However, the biggest similarity is the change in focus both books have.  Instead of taking a cue from the first two comprehensive books on Coney these authors only examined a limited time period in the island's history.  Each of the books looked at Coney island from 1884, when La Marcus A. Thompson invented the roller coaster, to 1911, the year of the Dreamland fire.  All of the stories about local politics, horse racing, people experiencing the beach and glamorous hotels were forgotten as these new authors deemed the events before and after this window of time unimportant.  Because of this, the major events from the twenty-seven years from 1884-1911 became the facts known about Coney by most readers of amusement park history.  For many people, Coney had become only historically significant as the place where the American amusement park and the roller coaster were born.  Many people forgot that the amusements went strong into the 1960's and saw Coney as a stepping stone rather than a large event in and of itself.

John F. Kasson's 1978 work, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, really challenged the ideas set down by Cartmell and Kyriazi.  While their books talked about Coney in limited terms, Kasson stated exactly the opposite.  His premise was that Coney Island was a very strong and influential force in its day.  Earlier authors have only talked about Coney as a place where the people of New York, and other New England states, would come and have a good time.  Kasson saw the atmosphere created at Coney by the three great amusement parks as a force which changed an entire generation of people.  He said, "Previous accounts of Coney Island have failed to grasp its larger significance.  Much of the writing has been in the vein of 'The Night They Burned Old Nostalgia Down,' elegiac accounts that concentrate on Coney Island's internal history and treat it as a curiosity, an independent principality of play."[3]

Amusing the Million was the first work to examine Coney and combine its history with an in-depth interpretation.  It not only told a new generation about the way Coney used to be, it also led the reader to understand that Coney was not an independent phenomenon.  I believe that the only other group besides Kasson to grasp the cultural importance of the island were the magazine writers at the beginning of the century like Albert Bigelow Paine, James Hueneker and Richard Le Gallienne.  They wrote about the cultural force that was Coney.  Pilat and Ranson, McCullough, Cartmell and Kyriazi had all failed to really show why Coney was such a powerful force.  Kasson was the first amusement park historian to say that Coney was more than a place of fun.  He hypothesized that the atmosphere at Coney had been created from many different social and economic issues of the day.  To him, the three amusement parks were more than places of simple play- they were important, unique social occurrences.

John Kasson laid out a carefully planned argument that progressed throughout the book.  Simply put, it read that the new generation in America at the turn of the century broke out from the oppressive Victorian culture.  He says for the first time Americans of all classes played together in a world where class didn’t matter.  Everyone went to Coney, even poor people living in the tightly packed slums of New York saved up all winter long to afford a day’s trip to there.  At Coney Island everyone was raised to the status of a king or queen.  They could be elevated from their menial jobs and thrilled at an amusement park by the very machines that they encountered and did not understand in the workplace.[4]  The book received a lot of praise from a society which had recently re-discovered the thrill of amusement park play for the first time in fifty years.  Amusement park historians, a group who had only come about in the early 1970’s, praised the book and its conclusions along with many university scholars.  Warren Susman of Rutgers said, “His [Kasson’s] inquiry into the nature and significance of Coney Island as a part of the American experience provides a brilliant device for understanding major transformations in America at the turn of the century.”  Kasson’s book reshaped the way Coney Island would forever be seen as an occurrence in history. 

Richard Snow published his work, Coney Island: A Postcard Journey to the City of Fire, in 1989.  It was a detailed history of the island focusing primarily on the time period between 1884 and 1911; a period already closely analyzed by both Cartmell and Kyriazi.  Snow’s book was a mixture of the approaches used by Kasson and Kyriazi.  A majority of the book is simply an in-depth look at the above time period.  Snow is able to delve deeper into the subject of the three amusement parks and incorporate some of Kasson's social and economic explanations into his book.  One good example is in the introduction when he says, "People who were struggling to cope with growing technological complexities in their jobs could spend an afternoon with the tables turned: at Coney, the machinery worked to divert them.”[5]

Snow's book offered new insight into the public love of Coney.  He talks about disaster shows like the "Galveston Flood," a recreation of the Boer War (both independent shows), and shows which were popular in Luna like "The Trip to the Moon" and "War of the Worlds.”[6]  Even though these shows were crude by our standards, in their day they overwhelmed the thousands of people who viewed them.  Only the upper echelon of society could afford to get away from a crowded, busy city to Europe for the summer.  The majority of the public had little or no idea what other places in the world were like, save maybe the village their family had come from.  Americans have always loved violence and at the turn of the century they received it in a different form.  Instead of seeing hundreds of people die in a film they went to Coney and watched as an entire city got swept away by a wall of water or saw Mount Vesuvius shower death upon the people of Pompeii.  Snow says that shows like "War of the Worlds" also gave Americans that feeling of pride, a feeling of what they thought their new country was going to become.  In this show the naval forces of Germany, France, Britain and Spain sailed together into Manhattan.  Then, Admiral Dewey's fleet sailed out and sank every one of the sixty boats which had come to threaten American independence.[7]  Through colorful examples like these Snow's Coney Island is able to give a wonderful history of Coney coupled with expanded interpretations of the ideas first written by John Kasson.

Richard Snow also collaborated with film director Ric Burns for their 1991 film "Coney Island: a documentary film."  This was the first video documentary to show the complex world of Coney.  The film was hailed as a triumph because it gave an in-depth look at Coney but was done so well as to capture the interest of a public who did not know what Coney Island was.  Although the ideas and the history are similar to Snow's book, I feel that it is important to note the things which could be done only through this video medium.  The pair worked to include people like Frederick Fried, an amusement park archivist and Elliot Willensky, an expert on architecture whose specialty was New York.  The use of video allowed people who would not normally have a voice to talk about the unique information they possessed regarding Coney.  The movie also showed a lot of footage taken from the late 1800's through the present-day.  This footage was carefully guarded and not readily accessible to the public because of its age and condition.  The makers of the film spent thousands of dollars to license these amazing shots of Americana from the Library of Congress and made them available to interested viewing audiences.  However, the most important thing the film did was to talk about the downfall of Coney, which will be discussed here later.

 A foil to Snow's work was Judith A. Adams 1991 book The American Amusement Park Industry.  This book looks at amusement park history in economic and demographic terms, tools which had only been used in a limited way in the field.   Like all good histories of the industry there is a chapter here on Coney Island its parks.  Instead of focusing on 1884-1911 like so many before her, Adams talks mostly about the three parks from 1897-1911.  But, she also uses data to analyze Coney from 1900-1950, breaking the trend which had been followed by most amusement park historians for twenty years. 

Judith Adams uses "population" and "hours of work" charts to help demonstrate why Coney became so popular.  She says that the time was simply ripe for Coney Island to exist.  New York had grown from 700,000 to 7.5 million in fewer than ninety years and the generation at the turn of the century was young.  She says that they needed a place like Coney to help them forget the tenement world they came from.  But, time passed and the dominant population shifted from the 15-30 to 25-54.[8]  Children of immigrant parents prospered and moved to the suburbs.  The draw that was Coney was no longer needed both in both New York and America as a whole.  Depressing as it is, Adams, and to a lesser extent Snow, try to give readers their first look at the demise of Coney. 

When the Coney’s first histories were written it still existed, and even when Kyriazi's book came out twelve years after Steeplechase closed he still described the Bowery as, "a little worse for wear, but still hanging in there.”[9]  It was almost as if these authors could not admit that the Coney which once existed, even the Coney of their childhood, was gone forever.  Both The American Amusement Park Industry and "Coney Island" worked to find out the reasons why Coney Island left us.  Adams talked about the fact that it was inevitable that Coney Island failed because of the shifting population.  She also cites the dramatic changes which occurred both socially and economically in the 1960's as reasons for Coney's downfall.[10]  Snow takes a more romanticized stand.  Both his film and book talk about how Coney appeared popular into the 1960's; in fact their largest day was Labor Day weekend in 1947.  But, he says that looking back at things a decline really started as early as the 1920's when the subway was extended to the island.[11]  Readers of many previous histories of Coney would be hard-pressed to find information on the demise of Coney.  Finally, with Snow and Adams we get not only the story behind the fall of Coney, but solid explanations to back it up.

The most thought provoking books of the series, Snow's, Adams', Kasson's and even Kyriazi to a certain extent, talked about one subject which was avoided in many earlier histories- sexuality.  It is not surprising that people like McCullough and Ranson & Pilat left sexuality out of their versions of Coney's history.  The later duo was writing in a sexually repressive era of 1941 about a place which still could been seen, smelled and touched.  I think McCullough did not write about sex because his uncle was George Tilyou.  Tilyou was one of the first people to use human sexuality as a part of his business, but I do not think Edo felt it would be right to say that his uncle thrived upon the hormones of people in their teens and twenties.  It took Kasson's book to bring the sexuality issue to the forefront.  He talked about how Coney offered a "loose" social atmosphere.  In a society where a boy and girl could only sit on the front porch swing together, Coney offered privacy in public.  They could go to Coney and lose themselves in the throngs of people.[12]  Snow also talked about the air of sexuality at Steeplechase.  There you could find rides which tumbled couples into each other's arms, "and always there was a flash of ankle as young women swung their legs across wooden horses.”[13]  Fortunately for historians the "sexual" side of Coney was only lost to us for forty years until a historian delved deep enough to bring these facts back into our historical field of vision.

Like Coney Island itself, the way we view its past is always changing.  One would think that because Coney's heyday existed less than a hundred years ago that we could know everything about it.  The eight sources here are detailed, in-depth and yet they only scratch the surface.  Over two hundred works, from books to magazine articles to movies, have been done about Coney since it first changed the face of America.  Luckily we have several good sources that paint wonderful and different pictures about the way the island used to be.   Though they vary, all of them together help create a tapestry which tells the story of a place that used to exist and allows us to keep it alive in our own hearts.  Even though Coney was only several blocks of amusement parks, it will always be remembered as so much more than that.  Guy Wetmore Caryl captured the feel of Coney the best for future generations, 

"The brazen voice of the island begins to beat upon the eardrums like the pulse of fever, the leaping horses and flying cars are metamorphosed into the agile demons of delirium.  And through the doorways of endless concert halls and drinking places one gets glimpses of faces that follow and haunt like the endless phantoms of a dream.”[14]

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Adam Sandy, Copyright 2001.