THE CENTURY ILLUSTRATED MONTHLY MAGAZINE
Coney Island is a peninsula in Brooklyn that was home to one of the earliest theme parks in America, as this piece from the early twentieth century describes. With roller coasters, board games, rides, and amusements all right across from the Atlantic Ocean, Coney Island has been a famous vacation destination for New Yorkers for more than a hundred years, but some people are a bit too snobby to go there. When I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn, I would ride the subway with my mom and brother to Coney Island.
The most distant dweller from New York City has heard of Coney Island. He may not be able to name a single theater on Broadway, the Metropolitan Art Museum may be to him without form, and void; but the reputation of Coney Island as a garden of gaiety to which the city itself seems more or less an adjunct is firmly established in the remotest hamlet of the farthest frontier.
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“Well, how’s Coney Island this year? How about old Coney?” is the question likely to greet the New Yorker in his rural wanderings. Whereupon the dweller on Manhattan Island may suddenly find himself involved in a humiliating confession that he has not been to Coney Island this year, or for half a dozen years; that to him it is a place almost as removed as though it were an island in the South Pacific, instead of a “Land of Heart’s Desire” lying close at his harbor gates. And the city man loses prestige with his questioners just in proportion as his lack of intimacy with the world-famed resort is revealed. No matter what else he claims to have seen, he cannot redeem himself. A man who lives within a ten-cent fare of Coney Island and does not go there is likely to be poor authority on any matter of recreation.