Coney Island and American Society

“I wuz glad that so many people, some of ‘em cut off from the beauty of life, could come here quickly and easily, and forgit their cares and toil for awhile, and go home refreshed and ready to take up their burdens agin.” -Samantha (Holley 292)

Mass Amusement

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, a genteel middle-class lifestyle occupied a position as the “official” culture of American life. In popular media, the vocal proponents of this culture dispensed advice, set fashions, and sought to control the influences of groups that they found threatening to their vision of public life. Cultural critics spoke of "honorific expenditures" by which social leaders could establish institutions of higher culture and purpose, thus inspiring in the working classes an reverent spirit that might guide them to emulate their cultural vision (Veblen 64-74).

In a movement that extended across the nation by the late 1890s, "genteel reformers founded museums, art galleries, libraries, symphonies, and other institutions which set the terms of formal cultural life and established the cultural tone that dominated public discussion" (Kasson 4). The civic leaders who supported these cultural institutions called their ideology of social control "The City Beautiful." They hoped that, by providing access to the world of high culture, they could instruct the great masses of the urban and immigrant working class in the traditional values of American life.

City Beautiful advocates like Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscape architect behind New York's Central Park, hoped that "social ills would be swept away, as the beauty of the city would inspire civic loyalty and moral rectitude in the impoverished." City parks were designed with winding, shaded paths that stood in stark contrast to the efficient, right-angled construction of the modern city. Museums, libraries, and other public buildings were built in classical styles that emphasized grace and order, and intended to inspire the population to embrace learning and civic duty (Rose, City Beautiful).

The insistence upon acceptance of the traditional and the high-brow was a statement of fear about dissenting cultural values but also fear of the power of the laboring masses. While welcoming working class families to the idyllic promenades of urban parks and claiming that “the rested man…was the productive man,” social leaders were in essence admitting their acquiescence to the people's insistence upon leisure. Even in supporting these opportunities for the working classes, patriarchal social leaders “never meant for leisure to become idleness or to produce nothing more than personal gratification” (Register 25).

Meanwhile, at Coney Island, the consumer economy was providing a challenge to the lofty idealism and trickle-down moralism of The City Beautiful.

“By the turn of the century the managers of mass culture sensed new markets both within the urban middle class and spilling beyond its borders to ‘high society’ and the largely untapped working class, all eager to respond to amusement in a less earnest cultural mood: more vigorous, exuberant, daring, sensual, uninhibited, and irreverent” (Kasson 6).

Coney Island, which in its early days boasted a rough-and-tumble lower-class amusement area separated physically from an upper-crust hotel resort area, became more unified with the advent of a mass middle class audience. Between the extremes of the amusements of the past, the enclosed amusement park was a concept which combined the majestic form and escapism of the great resorts with the anarchic sensual pleasures of the working class beach.

Pioneered by Paul Boyton at Sea Lion Park, the "amusement park" was made possible by the large numbers of urban workers and families who were finding themselves with time for leisure and a bit of money to spend on it. Increasingly, mass transportation became available to these people, who could now venture to amusement areas for a fraction of the cost and time it would have taken just years before (Kasson 7). The three amusement parks which thrived between 1895 and 1911, Steeplechase, Luna, and Dreamland, marketed a fantastic vision of mass desire to a newly-formed mass audience. Their success offered an answer to the question of what form leisure would take in the new modern era that produced them.

Fred Thompson, the founder of Luna Park, was particularly celebrated in contemporary media for pioneering mass urban leisure. With his very public boyish personna and flair for showmanship, Thompson was an ardent booster for the model he helped to create. “Luna founded a new and lasting paradigm for outdoor amusements – an architecturally unified and exotic garden of enchantment, which mocked the drab circumstances of everyday life and specialized in the experience of imaginative escape and thrilling fantasies” (Register 7). Through the 1900s, hundreds of Luna Parks, Coney Islands, White Cities, Dremlands, and Electric Parks opened in cities across America, all based on the business model and premise provided by the pioneering parks they referenced. Coney Island national brand, one that changed people's conception of leisure and "set the pace for every other modern American amusement park in the world" (Register 98).

Coney's vision of mass amusement was remarkably successful. By the end of the 1910s, press accounts declared crowds of 200,000 on Surf Avenue, 5 million paid admissions to Luna Park in a season - "Coney Island was in the business of 'amusing the million'," according to Fred Thompson. On a given day, people of all classes, all sizes, and all backgrounds could be found spending their nickels and dimes at Steeplechase. Even people who could just afford the cost of getting to the island still came "merely for the joy of mixing with the crowds...and catching the live sense of humanity and of good humor that is everywhere" (Kasson 38-39).

Throughout American history, the ability to purchase luxury goods and enjoy had reinforced the social hierarchy and belief in the rewards of virtuous labor. With the advent of industrialization, mass production, rising standards of living, and the marketing of the idea of consumption around the late 19th century, America became the Land of Desire, according to historian William Leach. The new democratic vision of desire stressed that material progress had made leisure and luxury available to the masses, and it was their right to claim these comforts at places like Coney Island (Leach 6-8).

In addition, as Coney Island's fame grew through imitation and its depiction in popular media, the park became seen as an essential element of American culture. For the ethnic minorities and recent immigrants that composed so much of New York's population at the time, the carnival atmosphere of the Island "generated a sense of festivity in many respects familiar to frequenters of, say, New York's Italian street festivals, band concerts, and theaters, or to celebrants of Purim and patrons of the Yiddish theater." Beyond this connection to the cultures of the old world, though, experiencing Coney was a means of assimilation. Thompson, Tilyou, and Reynolds didn't care whose coins they were collecting, nor how many shades of skin helped to fill the beach, and the parks' bacchanal did little to encourage distinction between its giddy participants (Kasson 39-40).

Towards the end of the 19th century, the entrepreneurs of entertainment, who were learning to use the language of desire and democracy to sell their amusements, had a new reality to deal with. While they were creating spaces where society's rules did not necessarily apply, individuals themselves were challenging these same rules.

Men whose conceptions of masculine virtue were rendered irrelevant by modern life were beginning to embrace a new virile vision of gendered accomplishment. Women, meanwhile, were claiming a greater role in American life and a greater opportunity to participate in leisure activities. Coney Island was not only a proving ground for the democratic promise of mass leisure, but the transformations shaping modern American gender.

Continue reading > New Men and Women

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