Literature
"The unconventional character of Coney Island made it naturally attractive to the avantgarde writers and artists who congregated in New York in the years leading up to World War I" Michael Immerso (Immerso 122)
The world of Coney Island represented many different things to many different people. While it is easy to focus on the loudness of the music performed everywhere at Coney, .jpg)
or the technological advances of films shot and played there, it is equally interesting to explore the world of Coney Island in literature. It is difficult to find specific references to Coney Island within novels, plays and poetry, especially from the time period under consideration. Even still, reading what well known authors thought about Coney Island helps us to better understand not only the atmosphere of the place, but the people who spent time there.
In 1878, "The History of Coney Island in Rhyme" was published. It is a childrens book and a humorous recount of various parts of the island. It is really interesting to look at the way the authors chose to describe the different scenes for children. One verse deals with a character named Smitzerl,
"A mermaid from the wave rose dripping,
And unto Diedrieck's side came tripping,
As mermaids of this later date,
Would do to one in such a state.
Into her ears, in accents brief,
Poor Smitzerl poured his clammy grief."
So within this funny little rhyme we can learn multiple things about the make up of Coney Island. The diverse group of people and the large immigrant population, for example, are obvious from the name of the character "Smitzerl". The whimsical air of the place is captured in the use of a mermaid and the fact that clams were one of the main foods consumed there (until the invention of the hotdog) is also learned in reading this verse.
Finding out how other authors responded to visiting Coney Island can also be very informative. Walt Whitman was a regular at Coney Island in the early days; "It was 
Coney's seclusion and its rugged and undisturbed vistas, however, that inspired Whitman to revisit time and again the "long bare unfrequented shore...where I loved after bathing to race up and down the hard sand, and declaim Homer or Shakespeare to the surf and seagulls by the hour.""(Immerso 14) Here Whitman is praising early Coney Island for its relaxed atmosphere and lack of crowds. Later, authors of the following generations would celebrate Coney 
Island for its chaotic diversity instead. We can sense this in E.E. Cummings response to Coney; "Coney Island is made up of a trillion smells; the tinkle and snap of shooting galleries; the magically sonorous exhortations of barkers and ballyhoomen; the thousands upon thousands of faces paralyzed by enchantment to mere eyeful disks, which strugglingly surge through dizzy gates of illusion; the metamorphosis of atmosphere into a stupendous pattern of electric colors, punctuated by a continuous whisking of leaning and cleaving ship-like shapes...Whereas at the theatre we are merely deceived, at Coney we deceive ourselves." (McNamara 24) Thus we can see how it is the different parts of Coney, or different eras of Coney really, that touched the two generations. This in itself seems indicative of the entire change 
the country was undergoing at the time. It is this change that helped Coney Island become what it did.
Authors often expressed their views on Coney Island in journal essays. William H. Bishop wrote in an essay for Scribner's Magazine, for example, "It is a Centennial of pleasure, pure and simple, without any tiresome ulterior commerical purpose, held amid refreshing breezes by the sea..." (Immerso 29) "Coney Island's "essential character," wrote Bishop, "is bound up with the crowd." It is interesting here that Bishop does not relate Coney to a commercial enterprise, but instead sees it as more akin to a relaxing retreat. Jose Marti however, was mostly amazed at its "prodigious nature": "The amazing thing there is the size, the quantity, the sudden tangible outcropping of human activity, that immense valve of pleasure opened to an immense nation...that monumental aspect of the whole that makes this land of amusement worthy of measuring itself against the majesty of the nation which supports it..." (Immerso 30)
