Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [899]
If our visitors sought excitement, they could have headed for the chaotic and exhilarating carnival quarter. West Brighton’s beachfront properties had been leased and subleased into tiny plots, on which small immigrant businessmen, showmen, and vendors had erected hundreds of pavilions, platforms, tents, kiosks, sheds, and shanties. Here visitors could play with lung testers, throw rings at cane stubble, shoot clay ducks, and try to hit a Negro on the nose (his head, stuck through a hole in a cloth, bobbing and weaving to elude the balls). They could get their pictures taken, their fortunes read, their strength tested, their weight guessed. As exiled Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti, entranced by Coney Island, reported to a Bogota newspaper in 1881, “to North Americans to weigh a pound more or less is a matter of positive joy or real grief.”
If our hikers were venturesome souls, they might have beelined for the mechanized rides, advertised in the World’s Sunday edition by amusement entrepreneurs like Peter Tilyou and his son, George. Merry-go-rounds were an old divertissement but had been steam powered only since 1865. And only since the mid-1870s had Charles I. D. Looff, a German immigrant carver who worked out of a small Gravesend factory, been crafting the fabulous animals and birds that adorned West Brighton’s carousels. In 1883 the first Loop-the-Loop opened for scary (and occasionally mortal) business. In 1884 its offspring the roller coaster was born, the progeny of LaMarcus A. Thompson. His trains, which tore up and down a giant steel structure, were an amalgam of the switchback railroads used in coal mines and the new elevateds crisscrossing the cities.
The roller coaster momentarily relieved riders of their inhibitions, providing welcome opportunities for romance. So did the beach. Many on the strand were tenement families in search of wholesome sea breezes. Mothers rented blue flannel suits and coarse straw hats, changed in the crudely built but affordable bathing houses, then cozied with their husbands while their all too often tubercular children buried one another in the sand. Singles displayed a more boisterous intimacy. At antebellum resorts each sex had taken its turn in the ocean on a fixed time schedule; in the 1880s they tumbled in together. Thousands, of both genders, shed cumbersome beach outfits for tighter-fitting, more revealing costumes and jettisoned much of their reserve as well, with women hugging fellows met minutes before.
Fellows wanting more than hugs repaired, as did flashily dressed sporting men, to the “Gut,” a ten-square-block area up toward West 8th Street, in whose wooden shanties and sheds more carnal appetites were attended to. The Gut’s brothels, dance halls, peep shows, and gambling dens provided plentiful helpings of sin, though not without peril. Knockout drops flowed freely, while crooks and swindlers found it easy to avoid the none too vigilant oversight of the Gravesend police.
Teeming West Brighton might well have reminded our sightseeing couple of the Bowery—indeed one of the principal saloon-lined thoroughfares was called “the Bowery”—and it was, overwhelmingly, a working-class pleasure ground. Skilled craftsmen and small shopkeepers tended to come on organized outings; garment workers, clerks, saleswomen, and servants came on their own or in small groups. Many were on Saturday half-holidays, the new summertime practice of closing at one P.M. adopted in the late 1880s by numbers of manufacturing and retail establishments. Others were at Coney on unpaid holidays: when broiling summer days turned Brooklyn’s iron foundries, sugar refineries, and glassworks into infernos, owners shut them down.
The Coney Island Roller Coaster. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 24, 1886. (General Research. The New York Public Libraiy. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
If our revelers had stayed on into the evening, they could have tried “Electric Bathing” in the flare of the arc lights newly installed along the shore, or gone to one of the well-lit music