Posts tagged coney island

On an average day in Coney Island from the years 1890 to 1915, these are a few of the amazing attractions a visitor could choose from:

• Lilliputia, an entire town of 300 midgets modeled on 16th century Nuremberg (only at half-scale) and featuring its own midget parliament, midget hotel, midget stables with midget ponies, Midget City Theater vaudeville shows, and midget fire department rushing off to put out imaginary fires at regularly scheduled intervals
• Fighting the Flames, an immersive spectacular which staged tenement fires every half hour and featured a cast of 2,000
• The Infant Incubator where real premature babies were put on public display, cared for by nurses behind a glass window and kept alive by a novel technology not yet available at hospitals
• The Bauer Sisters Candy Delicatessen where one could purchase “Sauer Kraut, Frankfurters, Pork Sausages…Meat Balls, Plum Pudding and a great many others too numerous to mention, all made of pure candy.”
• The Last Days of Pompeii, an extravaganza that combined historical vignette, theatre performance and a fireworks show in telling the story of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and of the destruction of Pompeii circa 79AD
• Orient, featuring the hanging gardens of Babylon, troupes of Indian performers, and a theater & museum with antiquities
• The Boer War, a recreation of pivotal moments in the recent war and starring 600 genuine Boer War veterans fresh from Johannesburg and performed in a 12,000-seat stadium
• The Galveston Flood, a a mechanical cyclorama dramatizing the Galveston flood which had killed 6,000 people only two years before
• The Temple of Palmistry
• A Trip to the Moon in which visitors take a trip to the moon by airship and are greeted upon arrival by midget moon men offering gifts of green cheese
• An enigmatic attraction named The House of Too Much Trouble
• The Insanitarium with Blowhole Theater, where clowns and midgets herded patrons with electric cattle prods, maneuvering women above jets of air which would blow their skirts up before an audience of park patrons
• Atlantis Under the Sea (see postcard above)
• Tilyou’s Dreamland Circus Side Show
• War of the World–aka The Great Naval Spectatorium–a war spectacular utilizing models & actors wherein 60 foreign ships attack New York City
• Monkey Music Hall, an “ape show” where 60 monkeys play in a band and allow peeks into their domestic life
• A recreation of a village of the head-hunting Bontac Tribe of the Philippines
• Streets of Delhi, a reproduction of a city street scene in India and Dubar of Delhi, in which 300 Indian natives in costume parade on elephants, camels, and horses
• Dragon’s Gorge, an indoor scenic railway with views of The River Styx and Hades (!!!), the North Pole, Africa, the Grand Canyon
• Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show
• Brownie’s Midget Theatre
• Crack of Doom, in which 1,000,000 gallons of water destroys a miniature mining town
• The Fall of Adrianople, a spectacular in which a Turkish city with mosques, bazaars, minarets & embattled castle is attacked and conquered by 1,800 invading Bulgarians, Serbs, Montenegrens, Greeks and Turks
• The Titanic Disaster, staged in 1914 and using miniatures of The Titanic and Carpathia to enact the principal events of the tragedy
• The Oriental Village with whriling dervishes, dancing girls, acrobats, camels & cafes serving Turkish coffee

(The Great Coney Island Spectacularium is an exhibition that aims to explore, celebrate, and evoke turn of the 20th Century Coney Island as the pinnacle of this kind of pre-cinematic immersive and spectacular amusement. The exhibition–a collaboration between Coney Island Museum Artist in Residence Joanna Ebenstein and Museum Director Aaron Beebe–will feature a combination of commissioned new works, curated antiquities, and installation and will premiere on Friday, April 8, 2011 in the Coney Island Museum.)

Ingrid Bergman, you’re so perty,
you’d make any mountain quiver
You’d make fire fly from the crater,
Ingrid Bergman

This old mountain it’s been waiting
All its life for you to work it
For your hand to touch its hardrock,
Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman

If you’ll walk across my camera,
I will flash the world your story,
I will pay you more than money, Ingrid Bergman

Not by pennies dimes nor quarters,
but with happy sons and daughters,
And they’ll sing around Stromboli,
Ingrid Bergman

Even though I like it, this song was kinda creeping me out this morning on the way to work, and now I know I’m not alone in what I was thinking:

“You have to realize that Woody’s reputation is based on about five percent of his output,” Guthrie fan and cover performer Billy Bragg once told an interviewer. “We only know the dust bowl Woody. We have no idea about the period where he lived with his family on Mermaid Avenue (on Coney Island) and dreamed about making love to Ingrid Bergman on a volcano.”

There it is.  And I was also very disappointed to find that his Coney Island house, the one on the front of the CD, has been replaced by a big dumb tower full of condos. I hate you, post-war developers.