#Canceled: OG Coney Island Would Make Modern Society Cry
Nostalgia has romanticized the idea of old Coney Island when it was unabashedly unhinged.
Old amusement park Americana. Atlantic boardwalks. Carousel horses. Pastel pin stripes. Minarets. Spires. Domes. Lights.
Turn of the century Coney Island commonly evokes a wistful, rosy retrospect laden mural of a seaside dream painted in Ferris wheels and penny arcades.
The sort of aesthetic bottled by many starry eyed brands — Royal Caribbean with their mega ships’ “Boardwalk Neighborhood,” Disney World with their deluxe resort “BoardWalk,” and even New South Wales with their own “Luna Park.” A glowing spirit of a bygone era curated in an utmost whimsical and nostalgic form. Tailored. Made over. Touched up with a brush of cosmetic work to ensure its legacy looks fashionable by modern society’s standards.
Because unfiltered, filler dissolved, Coney Island wasn’t a lovely watercolor post card image of more magical times.
Coney Island was utterly psychotic at best and a showcase of humanity’s depravity at worst.
A fever dream with a photogenic facade that made for enviable virality on social media. But as soon as the first internet sleuth dredged the old, deleted tweets… #canceled.
As in exploitation, racism, safety violations, animal cruelty, objectification, and beyond #canceled. Canceled, canceled.
Welcome to Coney Island!
To best understand the madness, you need to know the players. As Coney Island wasn’t one park, it was three.
Luna Park was the glowing debutante. Built in 1903, dressed like royalty: towers, turrets, 250,000 electric lights casting spells on the skyline. Luna was theatrical, alluring, romantic. It was the trailblazer and picturesque model of amusement parks.
Dreamland followed, the ambitious cousin desperate to be taken seriously. Grand columns, Italian marble, and tragic overcompensation. It offered opera-house aesthetics with tenement instincts. Disaster reenactments, simulated shipwrecks, and a “Hell Gate” ride that accidentally ignited and reduced the park to cinders.
And then there was Steeplechase. The prankster. The pervert. The anarchist. Home of “Laffing Sal,” electric shocks for laughs, and a human roulette wheel that spun you off its surface like a skee-ball. Steeplechase didn’t want your admiration. It wanted your dignity — and it was taking it without permission.
Each park had its own personality, but together? They created a mad wonderland that society today would balk at. For at Coney Island, anything went — so long as you paid admission first.
The Attractions.
Deranged. That’s all.
Rough Riders beat out The Terrifying Triplets for the status of the deadliest roller coaster in American history. Forget safety restraints. Feel free to bring your infant on board. When the coaster derails, again, the baby will be the only one unharmed. Rest assured in that, and that the coaster had a very short lifespan itself.
The Infant Incubator Exhibit. A classic! Premature babies in glass boxes, wired and monitored under heat lamps. Not a hospital. Just a sideshow. Like a petting zoo for neonatal innovation. Ethics up in flames — with the exhibit too — but the infants, at least, survived the ordeal.
And, the Blowhole Theater… yes, I know… a funhouse fun for the male gaze. Rigged to shoot jets of air up women’s skirts to flash the crowds and throw the same women off balance into nearby men. A factory for #MeToo stories.
But wait, there’s more!
The Culture.
Cruelty.
Topsy the elephant was a circus animal handed off to a drunken handler that was fired after riding the elephant into a police station. With no one else to handle Topsy, Luna Park decided to euthanize her in a public event. The ASPCA stepped in to ensure that it was done humanely — by simultaneously poisoning, electrocuting, and strangling Topsy at once. I wish I was kidding.
The parks trafficked in human exhibits too. Human zoos. None whatsoever to actually do with “education” as they claimed. And, even worse (being violent) racist “attractions” were part of Coney Island. I’ll just direct you to this article detailing such. I will not type out the name of them since they include slurs. It gets really ugly.
And on a… lighter… note, after Dreamland did burn to the ground, the park owners were swift to display the charred remains and dead circus animals to any spectator that opened their wallet. Literally hours after the fire was extinguished. Money over morals, you know?
Come one, come all!
I could go further. Coney Island absolutely went further. But I’d very much prefer a Living with the Land brain cleanse.
So…
Grab the glasses! Put the rosy retrospect lenses back on.
Coney Island is a vastly different world today than it once was.
Dreamland went up in flames. Luna Park went up in flames. Steeplechase went down for condominiums to go up (not in flames). And all that’s truly left is a newer seaside haunt named — drumroll — Luna Park!
But those silhouette of spires, sparkly carousel bulbs, lacquered Ferris wheels are a thing of sugarcoated memories. That bright, pastel, whimsical Americana feel and turn of the century charm…
Best enjoyed aboard Royal Caribbean or tucked in at Walt Disney World Resort!
The old Coney Island is a deceptively dazzling book cover that might’ve charmed its way onto your bookshelf. But careful turning the first page. Your freshly disillusioned eyes will never see that cover the same.