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By Root 8110 0

” seemed attractively exotic, and the early 1890s witnessed a “slumming” craze. Moses King’s 1893 guidebook urged a visit to Mott, Pell, and Doyers—a veritable Chinatown “with all the filth, immorality, and picturesque foreignness which that name implies.” Genteel visitors trooped to the area’s restaurants and the new “chop suey” houses that sprang up. The wilder ones sampled the forbidden pleasures of opium den and fan-tan parlor. All the activity finally created the sin-and-violence-drenched climate originally imagined to exist, as rowdy white Boweryites flocked to local bordellos, petty criminals took up residence, drunks and bravos engaged in combat, and tong extortionists preyed on Chinese (though never on white) businessmen.

The Chinese community was unique among the new immigrant groups in having its entire community turned into a cultural commodity. Jews and Italians did attract lovers of the “picturesque” to their neighborhoods, and they experienced the larger community’s scorn as well as its curiosity, but they were never subjected to anything quite like the indignities suffered by the Chinese. But the various communities did share something else: a capacity for artistic creativity that, in mutual interaction, would work a cultural revolution in New York City.

64

That’s Entertainment!

If an energetic couple had decided to hike from one end of Coney Island to the other on a summer Sunday in the late 1880s, their five-mile journey would have taken them through four wildly diverse communities.

Landing at the old steamboat dock on Coney’s extreme western edge would have plunged them into seedy old Norton’s Point. Though now grandly renamed the West End, it remained a year-round colony of crooks and unfortunates where, in season, rowdies congregated for prizefights, gambling, and prostitution. Respectable sorts gave the area a wide berth.

About a mile and half along the beach, past thickening numbers of bathhouses and makeshift eateries, our trekkers would have arrived in West Brighton and found themselves engulfed in noise—brass bands, hand organs, the shrieking whistles of arriving and departing steamers and locomotives, and the happy chatter of tens of thousands of merrymakers. The throngs poured out from Culver Plaza, where the Prospect Park and Coney Island Rail Road, popularly known as the Culver Line (a name that lives on to mystify today’s F line riders), debouched Brooklynites. Manhattanites headed for West Brighton could take a steamer to Bay Ridge and transfer to the New York and Sea Beach Railroad (1879), for a round-trip fare of only a quarter.

In West Brighton our visitors, if keen on gaining a panoramic overview, could have headed for the three-hundred-foot Iron Tower, which Andrew Culver had carted back from the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and ascended by elevator to a vantage point higher than Trinity’s steeple.

If hungry, they might have hustled directly to Charles Feltman’s Ocean Pavilion, a gigantic restaurant-cum-entertainment center. In the early 1870s Feltman, a German immigrant, had opened a shanty stand at the beach and begun selling clam roasts, ice cream, lager beer, and what Harper’s would call a “weird-looking sausage, muffled up in the two halves of a roll and smoking hot from the vender’s grid-iron.”

Coney Island Panorama, c. 1880. From its low end at Norton’s Point (on the far left), through West Brighton, Brighton Beach, and Manhattan Beach (on the far right), Coney’s atmosphere became progressively more refined. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

From Feltman’s, they might have walked to see the Elephant, a wood-framed, tinskinned hotel, 150 feet long and 122 feet high. It had thirty-four rooms in its head, stomach, and feet, a cigar store in one foreleg, a diorama in the other, and a dairy stand in its trunk. “Seeing the Elephant” became New Yorkese for going down to Coney. Equally dazzling landmarks were the two-thousand-foot Iron Piers, erected by steamboat companies in 1879 and 1881, amusement centers on a par with those at Blackpool and