Subtitle: The Peoples Playground
Author: Michael Immerso
Subject: New Jersey and the Region/Popular Culture/American History
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3138-1
Pages: 8.5 x 11, 208 pp., 26 color and 89 b&w illus.
Description: A richly illustrated history of America's most celebrated and influential amusement resort.
Praise for Coney Island
"This generously-illustrated homage to and history of a major manifestation of pop culture is bound to grab your interest."-- Boston Herald, Friday August 29, 2003 (Editor's Choice)
"The most detailed and insightful account yet of New York's Coney Island."-- American Studies International (October 2003, Vol. 41) Richard Longstreth
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Coney Island was the uncontested epicenter of Americas emerging mass culture. It was the quintessential American resort: the birthplace of the amusement park, the hot dog, and the roller coaster. Its history is one of breathtaking transformation and re-invention. Celebrated for its glittering amusement parks and its enormous crowds, it was in times past a mecca of grand hotels, race tracks, beer gardens, gambling dens, concert saloons, and dance halls. A new mass culture began to take shape there. Its harshest critics decried it as Bedlam by the Sea, but others deemed it a necessary outlet for the masses where the democratic spirit was granted free rein. Despite its precipitous decline, Coney Island remains a metaphor for the American amusement industry and the hundreds of honky-tonk resorts and amusement parks it has spawned.
Coney Island: The Peoples Playground is the first new history of Coney Island in almost half a century, tracing its evolution and cultural impact from its earliest development as a seaside resort to the present day Mermaid Parade. Presented in a photo-documentary format featuring more than one hundred vintage photos, archival material, personal accounts, and contemporary sources, the book evokes the atmosphere of the resort as experienced by those who visited it during its heyday. Through the reminiscences of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, literary figures, and amusement historians, Michael Immerso traces Coney Islands remarkable evolution and subsequent decline, while at the same time examining the remarkable individuals and complex social forces that contributed to its rise and fall.
Coney Island is not merely a documentary of the amusement industry or the story of a fabled amusement park, but rather a narrative of the way Americans, and particularly immigrants and urban Americans, came to regard the pursuit of leisure as part of their national birthright.
Michael Immerso is a writer, cultural historian, publicist, and social activist who has worked in collaboration with many of New Jerseys leading cultural and educational institutions as a curator and designer of cultural programs. He is the author of Newarks Little Italy: The Vanished First Ward (Rutgers University Press) and a co-producer of a documentary film based on the book.
Excerpt from Coney Island
"A much-faded Baghdad by the Boardwalk, Coney is true to its past. It remains a repository of our cultural memory evoking times past, an entire century when our nation matured and gained its footing, but in the process lost much of its innocence. In its day it was as potent as the movies. More so, perhaps, because its auditors were also participants; its action live. One can still experience there, in the absence and wreckage of its past splendor, the lingering charge of Coneys kinetic carnival. Too potent to be dismissed simply as an amusement mausoleum, it remains to this day Americas populist frontier."
