Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [901]
PLEASURE AND COMMERCE
Coney Island, in the space of a decade, had leapt from marshy obscurity to preeminence among the world’s beach resorts. It was remarkable for its size and for its segmentation—the way its component parts were sorted and sequenced by class, from “low” to “high,” with each zone governed by its own conventions. Even more remarkable—and alarming, to guardians of the traditional order—was the way West Brighton encouraged unconventional behavior. Reformers called it “Sodom by the Sea.” They were upset by the doings in the Gut, of course, but also by the spooning on the beach, the frolicking in the waves, the way people acted (said one shocked observer) “precisely as if the thing to do in the water was to behave exactly contrary to the manner of behaving anywhere else.”
West Brighton was also disconcerting in the connections it was fostering among New York’s immigrants. On Sunday ethnic groups that during the week were segregated by work or neighborhood mixed and mingled at the shore. At Coney’s rides and beaches, diverse peoples swam, ate, played, and rode together, encouraging development of an interethnic—albeit white—“New York” sensibility, an eclectic camaraderie that paralleled and perhaps undergirded such multiethnic entities as the Central Labor Union and Henry George campaign. Ever since Petrus Stuyvesant’s day, the city’s upper classes had tried to suppress plebeian ways of having fun that appeared to undermine established authority. But this quest took on added importance in the 1880s, a time when unions, Catholics, ethnic nationalists, and new immigrants—the very people gamboling and gambling at West Brighton—were boldly challenging the city’s political, economic, and religious status quo.
In this context, what seemed most unnerving about West Brighton was its unembarrassed air, the way it exuded a sense of entitlement to a band on the city’s recreational spectrum. The entire structure of Coney Island seemed to reinforce this claim. All the communities, after all, had undergone their explosive development simultaneously, and they shared the same strand. This temporal and territorial equivalency suggested a moral and cultural equality—as if styles, tastes, and practices at either end of the beach were equally “legitimate.”
Worse, West Brighton’s wayward ways seemed impervious to criticism or correction, in part because its cultural independence was sustained by powerful businessmen. Entrepreneurs of leisure, since the tavern keepers of New Amsterdam, had always resisted regulation. But never before had entertainment been such big business.
Among those developing amusement parks around the metropolitan area were transportation, real estate, and brewery magnates. Pleasure gardens had become all but extinct in Manhattan, victims of rising land values, but were being reborn, in far grander format, on the urban periphery. Their developers sought to increase traffic on streetcar lines, lure consumers to selling grounds, and enhance property values. In the early 1880s Bowery Bay (site of today’s La Guardia Airport), then far from the nearest village, had been a popular Queens destination for picnickers. In 1886 piano potentate and nearby land baron William Steinway, along with brewery industrialist George Ehret, transformed the isolated strand into Bowery Bay Beach (renamed North Beach in 1891). Soon it was festooned with beer halls, supplied exclusively by Ehret, and swarming with tens of thousands of patrons, who arrived on Steinway-owned mass transit. North Beach grew ever more boisterous, yet ever more profitable, and its owners ever more averse to bluenose