I emigrated to the US in 1985 and, after about a year of living in the Bronx, my mother took me down to Coney Island to meet the man who would become my new father. It was practically the same trip The Warriors took in 1979 but it took about a half an hour longer than the runtime of the film.
I was shy and quiet, as the photos from that day still show. I remember riding the carousel on Stillwell Avenue (just down the block from the famous Cyclone) and slipping into a kind of soft, melancholic trance. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the long train ride, maybe it was the vibe of that place.
The “Abandon all hope…” line was the only Dantean feature.
My mom’s new boyfriend lived with his parents in a rent-controlled apartment in Luna Park; a housing project that got its name from the old amusement park that once electrified the Coney Island skyline with a quarter of a million lights.
Luna Park 1903
But the 20-story housing projects that took its place were orange, brutalist slabs, encased in rusting chain-link. This would be my next home.
Luna Park 1988
The film Requiem For A Dream (2000), which was shot in and around Coney Island, does an unfortunately good job of communicating the general look and vibe.
My future grandma (and I) would be among these “yentas” as my grandad would call them.
The owner of the condo was my future grandad: Kosher Kowboy (read about him in my essay What’s So Funny?) was an amateur stand-up comedian and retired teacher who also spent much of his retirement scanning the Coney Island beach with a metal detector, searching for gold like Sir Raleigh searching for El Dorado. He had a bookshelf full of carefully sorted boxes full of found rings, pins, pendants, and coins; including hundreds of tarnished nickels that have since returned to the land.
The Nickel Empire
Before the 1870s, Coney Island was a place for picnics and nature walks; a vacation spot for wealthy Manhattanites. There were once plans to build an exclusive resort for white Protestants. With the introduction of ferry service from Manhattan, it began to develop as a commercialized district, bringing large numbers of visitors, especially working-class immigrants.
Dubbed “America’s Playground,” Coney Island was America in miniature; a cultural space that embodied both the excitement of modernity and the tensions of class, race, and entertainment in the emerging American industrial era. A place where dreams were mass-produced, sold for a nickel, and already falling apart by the time you reached the exit.
The 200-foot Elephant Hotel had become a brothel before it burned down in a spectacular fire that was visible from Sandy Hook, New Jersey.
Steeplechase Park, the first great “amusement” park, opened in 1897. It was a mechanized playground where the working class could laugh, collide, and blush in public. The knowing grin (and sometimes wink) of the park’s mascot suggested this was a place for all kinds of pleasure.
Side Quest: The Birth of Porn
Coney Island had also become a testbed for emerging technologies. The Kinetoscope (Edison’s invention for viewing short films individually through a peephole) was a featured attraction in many arcades and sideshow parlors.
These machines were coin-operated and deliberately voyeuristic, reinforcing Coney Island’s broader cultural role as a place of social inversion, where working-class men could briefly feel wealthy, and social norms could be bent under the mask of amusement.
Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1894) and Fatima’s Dance (1895), were among the most widely distributed Edison films at the time.
Before Marilyn. Before Zendaya. There was Annabelle Whitford Moore: the teenage dancer who lit up the earliest films.
Annabelle was 14 when she was invited to dance at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
In 1894, she starred in “Annabelle Butterfly Dance” representing the genteel fantasy; a white girl spinning in silk, captured by Edison’s lens for coin-fed voyeurs.
From 1896 to 1902, she was Annabelle Moore, Edison’s in-house muse at Edison’s The Black Maria, the first “film” studio.
The Greatest Bachelor Party on Earth
As this New York Journal article from 1897 describes, in December 1896, 18-year old Annabelle Moore was invited to perform, semi-nude, at an elite Gilded Age Bachelor Party for Clinton Seeley, grandson of P.T. Barnum. She refused. Her stepfather reported the party to the police, prompting a late-night raid. No charges were filed, but the scandal was public.
A dancer going by the name Little Egypt (Ashea Wabe) is said to have stepped in to perform instead (hiding in the closet when police checked in) but eventually delivering the spectacle the men wanted.
Little Egypt
Dancer Farida Mazar Spyropoulos, billed as Little Egypt, also debuted her dance the “hoochie coochie” for American audiences at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Her movements (centered on the hips, not the face) were unlike anything Victorian America had seen and supposedly almost gave Mark Twain a heart attack.
Not long after, an Edison short film known as “Fatima, the Belly Dancer” featured the same dance but starring Fatima Djamile. She would also be associated with Little Egypt.
Fatima’s Dance became a scandal and a hit. Edison’s team later re-cut the film to cover or remove the most revealing moments, marking one of the first acts of cinematic censorship.
Little Egypt had already become a national obsession, triggering waves of moral panic and legal crackdowns, but also voyeuristic curiosity. For middle-class white Protestant audiences, Little Egypt was a culture shock. Her dance challenged ideals of female purity, decorum, and racial superiority, even as it was consumed with morbid fascination.
Electric Eden
Luna Parkbegan as a hallucination brought to life; a glowing playground of electricity, fantasy, and mechanical wonder that emerged seemingly overnight in 1903. In a Coney Island still crawling out of its reputation as a rough-and-tumble beachside vice zone, Luna was something else.
Co-founded by Frederic Thompson (who had debuted his Trip to the Moon ride at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition), Luna Park carried over that exact attraction complete with papier-mâché moonscapes and costumed Martians.
Named after both the moon and the myth of lunacy, the park invited visitors into a world of controlled chaos; glowing towers, mechanical rescues, fire rides, exotic villages, and dreamlike simulations.
To keep the crowds returning, founders Thompson and partner Dundy had to outdo themselves year after year. Every season brought new spectacles, each more elaborate and costly than the last.
As the novelty wore thin and copycat parks like Dreamland rose across the street, Luna had to spend more to deliver less. The margins got tighter, the stakes higher.
Living The Dream
Dreamland, opened in 1904, was one of the most ambitious amusement parks ever built, meant to rival Luna Park and turn Coney Island into a global entertainment epicenter.
Founded by former politician and real estate mogul William H. Reynolds, Dreamland’s architecture gleamed white with classical symmetry. Its attractions included a biblical Genesis diorama “Creation”, a re-staging of Pompeii’s destruction, and a literal End of the World show, complete with planetary apocalypse and salvific Christian cross.
Luna Park and Dreamland were direct descendants of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, borrowing not only its architectural style but also its ideological framework and core attractions.
Modeled after the White City’s gleaming façades, both parks used plaster and electric lighting to create a dazzling dreamscape of modernity, fantasy, and order; designed more for nighttime spectacle than permanence.
The stucco structures were not weather-resistant and highly flammable.
Side Quest: The Fragile White City
The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 was a technological wonder, best remembered for Thomas Edison’s luminous “White City,” illuminating not just buildings but America’s collective imagination.
It was a sprawling, neoclassical collection of white stucco buildings that were designed to impress and symbolize America’s entry into the modern age.
The buildings were made from a temporary material called staff, a mixture of plaster and burlap, which gave them the gleaming white appearance that inspired the “White City“ nickname. The buildings were not meant to be permanent. They were constructed as part of the spectacle of the fair, showcasing American architectural and engineering prowess.
Here, electricity wasn’t merely displayed, it was mythologized as the engine of future progress. Its gleaming white buildings symbolized the triumph of American industrial power, reinforcing the idea that progress required cultural and racial supremacy.
Human Zoo
Upon entering the fair, visitors must first pass through the ethnic villages of the Ethnological Exposition, intended to showcase “primitive” peoples from around the world (Native Americans, African tribes, Filipinos, Eskimos) often in re-creations of their supposed native habitats. The fair organizers, influenced by ideas of Social Darwinism and racial hierarchies, presented these people as living examples of early stages of human evolution, placed in contrast to the so-called “civilized” white attendees.
The activities performed were not always an accurate representation of their actual cultures at the time. Many of these individuals were asked to perform or reenact “primitive” or archaic practices that aligned with the fair’s goal of presenting them as living examples of early human stages, reinforcing racial and cultural stereotypes. In many cases, the performances were exaggerated, romanticized, or invented for the amusement of fairgoers.
Over 20 million people reportedly visited the fair in it’s 6-month run before the temporary stucco buildings began to crack and deteriorate. While the majority of the buildings were torn down, the fair’s ideals and innovations lived on. Elements like Edison’s electric lighting and early amusement park rides were incorporated into future attractions, notably in Coney Island.
Greeks & Freaks
At the heart of Dreamland’s spectacle was the Freak Show. The park featured a dedicated sideshow of “living curiosities” (bearded ladies, giants, dwarfs, conjoined twins) but also what might be called ideological freakery; the infantilized poor, racial “others,” and disabled veterans presented as objects of fascination and pity.
Alongside these were artificial disasters like the “Hell Gate” fire reenactment and the “Infant Incubator” exhibit, which presented premature babies as both marvels of science and living sideshow attractions.
These juxtapositions (between life and death, technology and deformity, progress and perversion ) were not accidental. They were the essence of Dreamland’s vision. Whereas Luna Park leaned into fantasy and electricity, Dreamland tried to moralize its spectacle. It showcased “Lilliputia,” a miniature city inhabited by little people, and staged dramatizations of prison life and ethnic “exhibits” like “Zulu warriors” and “Aztec children.”
Eugenicists’ Day at the Beach
In my essay The Father of Fiscal Kulture I talk about the fitness guru who started the Coney Island Polar Bear Club. Part of his marketing campaign involved posing like a Greek statue on the boardwalk just down the block from the freak show, a specimen and advocate of many of the ideas that would soon be called Eugenics.
From 1910 the brand new Eugenics Record Office operated out of Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, collecting family pedigrees and advocating sterilization of the unfit.
They were there to study performers like Little Egypt (who drew crowds with eroticized dances that reinforced colonial fantasies and racialized sexuality) and Chief Pantagal, aka The Wild Man, a supposed “South Seas Islander” or “native of New Guinea,” who bit the heads of chickens.
Chief Pantagal was in fact Thomas Robinson, a performer who worked with several traveling shows. A 1920s article from The Billboard reveals that Robinson was really a savvy showman navigating both legal trouble and the economics of sideshow life.
Coney Island (especially during the Dreamland era) represented everything that eugenics wanted to control; racial mixing, sexual freedom, urban anonymity, and the visual normalization of “abnormal” bodies. It was a living laboratory of immigration-era anxiety. Italian, Irish, Jewish, Caribbean, and Eastern European visitors mingled freely with each other and with WASP elites slumming it for cheap thrills. Eugenicists saw this as a threat to both racial purity and social order.
Instead, they were confined to a fabricated village, forced to reenact rituals, including dog-eating (an otherwise rare meal in their culture) for millions of paying spectators. Hunt built a fake headhunter’s watchtower and marketed them as savages, feeding a national fantasy that framed American imperialism in the Philippines as benevolent uplift.
Though the U.S. had seized the Philippines in 1898 under the guise of bringing “civilization,” cities like Manila already had printing presses, universities, and European-educated elites. Most Filipinos were Catholics, farmers, and artisans, not tribal nomads. By showcasing only remote hill tribes, American showmen erased this reality to justify conquest and extraction.
The press sensationalized their bodies and customs. Hunt withheld their pay, fed them dogs from the city pound, and fled across state lines when investigated, pursued by Pinkerton agents. The audience saw spectacle, what they didn’t see was exploitation disguised as entertainment.
Sodom By The Sea
By 1910, Dreamland’s debts totaled $2.2 million, Reynolds admitted Dreamland never paid investors or serviced its debt. In 1911, Dreamland burned to the ground while work was being done on the Hell Gate. It’s internal fire system failed and fire gutted the park within hours, killing animals, destroying attractions, and rendering most of Dreamland unsalvageable.
In 1930, Sodom by the Sea exposed the underside of the dream. Oliver Pilat and Jo Ranson chronicled the crime, graft, and decay eating away at the fantasy.
Coney Island was rotting from the inside long before the crowds thinned. Businessmen cut corners. Politicians took bribes. Mobsters skimmed off the top. The parks that once promised wonder slowly crumbled into scams and firetraps. No one repaired. They drained every last dollar out of the dream, and when it finally collapsed, they blamed the immigrants and the poor. But the truth was simpler. The system had devoured itself.
Side Quest: El Dorado Carousel
Crafted in 1902 by German carousel maker Hugo Haase, the El Dorado Carousel was a marvel of its time. Featuring three platforms rotating at varying speeds and illuminated by 5,000 lights, it captivated visitors with its grandeur.
After surviving the 1911 Dreamland fire, albeit with some damage, it was relocated to Steeplechase Park’s Pavilion of Fun in 1912.
Subsequently, it was sold and eventually found a new home at Toshimaen Amusement Park in Tokyo, Japan. Today, it stands as one of the oldest operating carousels in the world.
The Gut
By the 1940s, Luna had become a faded relic of a bygone era. Its end came on August 13, 1944, when a massive fire (fueled by decades-old wood and plaster) ripped through the park. It was never rebuilt.
Helter Skelter ride at Luna Park. The term would later refer to societal collapse.
Behind the lights and laughter was exploitation of labor and corruption. The same system that built Coney Island would burn it down without blinking. It was capitalism’s first carnival, and its first graveyard.
The most notorious section of Coney Island was called “The Gut”, a knot of back alleys, crumbling houses, and storefronts patched together with hope and hustle. When the dream started dying, The Gut was what remained.
City officials often referred to it as one of the worst slums in America. It’s name was likely a shorting of gutter, but it must have felt like the belly of hell. The area would eventually catch the attention of a real estate mogul named Trump. No, not that one.
Fred Trump’s No Fun Zone
Fred Trump had acquired part of the old Luna Park site in the early 1950s. (Luna Park had already been destroyed by fire in 1944, so he was buying the vacant, charred land.)
But in the 1950s, Trump was blacklisted by the federal government (following investigations into profiteering and corrupt practices involving public housing contracts) and he lost the Luna Park land.
By the mid-1960s, preservationists were pushing to landmark parts of old Coney Island. Steeplechase Park (the beating heart of the dream) was under consideration. But Fred Trump had other plans.
He intended to redevelop the site, initially claiming he would bring in new amusements. But in reality, he wanted high-rise residential projects there too.
In the early 1960s, he built Trump Village nearby. To clear space, he pushed low-income families into dilapidated summer bungalows in Coney’s West End and profited from the relocation fees paid by the government. But these communities had no winter insulation, no infrastructure. It was a poverty trap.
Summer bungalows with no insulation or heating.
Fred Trump helped engineer the decline of Coney Island by displacing poor families. And he profited from it. Trump bought the land, threw a demolition party, handed out bricks, and bulldozed the Pavilion of Fun before the Landmarks Commission could act.
Trump posed with a sledgehammer and models in swimsuits
It was a public execution of the old American dream. Trump promised luxury condos but never built them. He left behind an open wound: rubble, rust, and chain-link fences.
Fred Trump and 19yr old Donald Trump in Coney Island in the 1960s
By 1986, I was living in Luna Park, sleeping on the couch in my soon-to-be stepdad’s family home, ready to live the American Dream.
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