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By Root 8307 0

halls and open-air theaters, often managed by Irish barkeeps from New York. There they could have seen and heard pianists, dancers, female impersonators, ballad singers, and comedy acts as broad as the beach. These establishments provided jobs for thousands of recent immigrants, many of whom became full-time Coney residents. They worked as bartenders, cooks, bathhouse keepers, musicians, domestic servants, vendors, and hotel waiters (many of the latter listing their occupation as artist or actor). The percentage of blacks in the year-round population—8.3 percent—was far higher than in Brooklyn or New York, though their numbers at the beach were far fewer.

If our hypothetical hikers had torn themselves away from West Brighton and pressed on east, they would soon have reached a relatively empty stretch of beach, paralleled by a tree-lined concourse and bisected by Ocean Parkway—Coney Island’s Great Divide. Roughly three-quarters of a mile from the Elephant, they would have come upon the grounds of the enormous, low-slung, mansarded, stick-style Brighton Beach Hotel.

Our travelers had entered Brighton Beach—a different world from West Brighton, and differently peopled too. Sitting on the great hotel’s broad verandas, strolling on its vast lawns down to the boardwalk at surf’s edge, or listening (after 1888) to Anton Seidl direct serenades at the bandstand were large numbers of what one 1890 paper called “good middle-class Brooklynites.” Brighton drew businessmen and their families, doctors and lawyers, white-collar office workers, clerks in insurance firms, and salesmen with manufacturing companies.

Brighton Beach reflected the unified vision and ownership of William A. Engeman, a New York-born carpenter who had made a wartime fortune selling mules to the Union Army. Captivated by Coney and its pecuniary possibilities, Engeman tracked down the various owners of two hundred acres of marshland and sand dunes and bought them out cheap. Then he constructed the four-hundred-foot-wide, two-story Brighton Beach Bathing Pavilion (ready for the 1878 season), and the following year he opened the Brighton Beach Racetrack, a mile-long course that by 1882 was netting him two hundred thousand dollars a year.

Meanwhile, a powerful consortium of Brooklyn businessmen and politicians—including Henry Murphy and William Kingsley of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge Company—had bought half of Engeman’s property and on it erected the Brighton Beach Hotel. The group also built the Brooklyn, Flatbush, and Coney Island Railroad to deliver passengers to its doorstep, placing BF&CI stations conveniently near middleclass Bedford, Clinton Hill, Ocean Hill, and Prospect Park. Brooklynites could train down for a music programme and be home by a reasonable hour, or entire families could settle in for the summer while husbands commuted to work in the cities. The hotel also attracted racing devotees, including Wall Street high rollers, politicians, actresses, and socialites.

Finally, if our trekkers had headed eastward one more time, they would have crossed another half-mile gap, then come upon two magnificent edifices: the Manhattan Beach Hotel with its turreted roofs and pinnacles, and the moorish Oriental Hotel, replete with fanciful minarets. It would not, however, have been easy for our beachcombers to have got near these palaces, as a high fence surrounded the area, and Pinkertons at the private railway station monitored arriving coaches of the New York and Manhattan Beach Railway to screen out undesirables.

Manhattan Beach was the brainchild (and property) of New York railroad magnate and banker Austin Corbin. In the depressed 1870s he had picked up over five hundred acres of shorefront marshland for $16,500 and given it a glamorous name. Then he inaugurated the railway that whisked Manhattanites directly to his two hotels within an hour. To ensure exclusiveness, he charged the highest prices in the country. To ensure even greater exclusiveness, he banned Jews in 1879.

Corbin’s hostelries succeeded in attracting an elite clientele, almost up to