Coney Island and American Society
" Every device imaginable by which man may be separated from his dimes without adequate return is in operation." -James Huneker
The
influential Chicago World's Fair of 1893 displayed the material plenty
of American industry as a medium through which it could explain the
march of progress in the modern world. The carefully constructed image
of the fair communicated the hope that modernity and industrialization
could produce a perfect, ordered world of hegemonic values and American
identity. The fair's Court of Honor was composed of symmetric Beaux
Arts palaces of virtuous labor which were augmented by ubiquitous
images of the triumph of human civilization. Commercial capitalism was
celebrated, but not as an ends - rather, the great progress embodied by
Westinghouse, General Electric, and the like was akin to a rising tide
of production that would lift all boats. This high-brow image of
American society insisted that the future would reflect its lofty
idealism and vision of material progress (Trachtenberg 212-215).
The idea of urban amusements as visions of surplus and luxury was tied to late 19th century developments in consumer capitalism. America's industrial revolution had revolutionized industry and shocked society's traditional assumptions about consumption. It was underconsumption, not underproduction, that most worried turn of the century businessmen. While incredible increases in productivity and efficiency allowed mass production to become a reality, it was unclear whether people could be convinced to buy more goods simply because they existed. Something about overconsumption seemed fundamentally un-American to many people (Leach 36-37).
"The
great merchants and theatrical businessmen of the era well understood
that they had to overthrow the authority of deeply rooted ethical and
religious traditions and proscriptions that encouraged work and
self-denial and fostered a suspicion of material luxury and secular
pleasures,” according to historian Woody Register. Inherent was a
sacrilization of childhood, fairy tales, play, "thrills", pleasure,
toys, games, and fun (Register 12).
Cultural brokers like Fred Thompson, the man behind Luna Park, made a fortune selling the idea of indulgent desire, and inspired followers across the country. Advertising and commercial design took on new relevance as it became necessary to sell the idea of consumption as much as to sell a product. These brokers of consumer capitalism used elements of religious architecture like light, color, and monumental scale to construct paradises of desire in amusement areas like Coney Island. Merchants of desire also appropriated the language and ideology of America's founding mythology. Progressive author Herbert Croly wrote that the "promise of American life [consisted of the] promise of comfort and prosperity for an ever-increasing majority of good Americans". By 1915, American culture seemed to have accepted the idea of indulgence as the means by which to achieve not only happiness, but also a new vision of democracy (Leach 5-10).
Increasingly, it was leisure that embodied the new ethos of indulgent consumption. The rise of city-dwelling and urban industrial labor had taught Americans "to sit in rooms cluttered with bric-a-brac, to limit the size of their families, to accept the authority of professional elires, to mask their aggressions behind a thickening facade of gentility,...to conform to the discipline of machinery," and these were troubling trends for marketers of desire (Higham 27).
The
response was to broaden the audience for leisure, an activity that was
once restricted to a so-called "leisure class," but which was now
available to a great many middle- and working-class Americans because
of the eight-hour workday and prosperity of the domestic economy.
Perhaps surprisingly, "Workers who sold their time and labor and
submitted to the bosses' control could daily assert a sense of
independence" in public spaces...Working-class leisure thus offered a
refuge from the dominant value system of competitive individualism" (Peiss 4).
George C. Tilyou of Steeplechase, Fred Thompson, and William H. Reynolds of Dreamland, all understood the incredible draw of the amusements they constructed, and became consummate showmen in creating on Coney a Mecca of commercial desire. Thompson, for example, "surrounded his patrons with visions as different from the everyday world of denied or delayed gratification as he could allow himself to imagine. His amusements did not remind people of their insuperable shortcomings, but shouted ‘yes’ to their wishes. In the ‘playgrounds’ he created on Coney Island and in Manhattan, amusement was composed of nonstop action, unceasing variety, and novelty, pleasures without end, unlimited abundance” (Register 11). In short, these men offered the pleasures of consumer life as a cheap and easy substitute for the promises of religious and civic institutions, formely available only through hard work and delayed gratification.
The architecture of Coney Island's parks, especially Luna and Dreamland, embodied the place's reputation as "apotheosis of the ridiculous" (Kauffman, Coney Island). Thompson was once an architecture student, but rebelled against his formal training with the ecclectic design of Luna's "Free Renaissance" style. Using "all the license in the world," Thompson emphasized the oriental, the ornamental, the festive - "an abundance of detail to create a propulsive sense of rhythym" and overwhelm the senses (Kasson 63-64). Not content to allow this vision of otherworldly delight to exist only in the light of day, Thompson was audacious enough to light it up at night with the technological wonder of electric arc lamps. His boasts about the spectacle and profit of his park encouraged visition as well as emulation, both at Coney Island in Dreamland park, and in hundreds of other similarly gaudy amusements that opened across the country at the time (Register 98).
Critic James Huneker, for one, could not resist the
draw of Coney Island's sensory delights as advertised by its
advertising entrepreneurs. "It was a poster that sent me to 
Coney
Island again, although I had sworn never to tread that Avenue of
Hideous
Sights and Sounds, had taken a solemn oath at least five years ago. But
that poster! Ah! if these advertising men only knew how their signs and
symbols arouse human passions they would be more prudent in giving
artists full swing with their suggestion-breeding brushes." Huneker
describes an image of a band conductor presiding over a "succulent
symphony of crabs, lobsters, fruit and fish, corn, cantaloupes, clams,
and watermelons," the mental impression of which demanded that he make
haste to Coney (Huneker, New York Times).
Architecture described as "orgiastic," foods and sounds from around the world, barkers hawking goods and games, an unending variety of strange thrills and visual pleasures: this was Coney Island in the early 20th Century, and few were able to resist its spell. Unlike the staid, high-brow conservativism of the 1893 World's Fair, Coney's parks were monuments to the crass, the consumable, the sensory pleasures of the capitalist economy. In order to maintain a vigorous, prosperous society, it seemed that Coney and its hedonism was necessary.
For all the show of unrestrained joviality and carefree excess, Coney was a remarkable business success. In fact, it was dispensing "standardized amusements" to a mass audience - one that had never before assembled for the communal experience of anything, much less bacchanalian amusement (Kasson 105).
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