It was shortly after 8pm on an early September Sunday when I arrived at Coney Island. The sun had begun to set and all the buildings lining Ocean Avenue were bathed in that warm orange glow that would soon give way to twilight. I’d spent a weekend visiting New York City, taking in its sights and sounds, its energy, and a visit to this iconic Brooklyn neighborhood was to be the culmination of my trip.
Earlier in the evening I’d left Manhattan, crossing the Williamsburgh Bridge into Brooklyn with the Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds blaring on my car stereo. All of the bridge’s lanes were tied up in traffic and commuters were getting tense. Brian Wilson’s brilliantly gentle pop arrangements stood in sharp contrast to the cursing, angry snarls, angrier hand gestures and deafening car horns erupting just outside the window.
With the bridge behind me, I found myself on the northern-most part of the Brooklyn peninsula, with Coney Island lying at its southern tip. Southbound, I drove through Adelphi, South Brooklyn, Flatbush, Kensington. I passed Prospect Park, Greenwood Cemetery, various Laundromats, pizza parlors, used electronics stores and broken down pawn shops. All of them were distinct, colorful and alive; the city brimming with kinetic energy on this late summer evening.
I scanned the FM airwaves on my car’s radio in order to find some music for my southbound drive. A few flicks of the dial later, loud reggae tunes emerged from the speakers. The syncopated guitar clicks, bursts of Caribbean-inflected organ tones and a dub-style bass and drum groove provided a suitably sunny soundtrack. The radio DJ would intermittently cut through the mix with loud chants of “All islands under one nation!” The passion in his voice was enough to single-handedly ignite a Caribbean revolution. The mix of chilled tunes and the host’s fiery reclamations were an odd mix, yet I found myself strangely enthralled.
Shortly before arriving in Coney Island, I drove through Brighton beach, a neighborhood just east of my destination. Brighton Beach is particularly distinct because of its considerable Russian community. A bustling Russian marketplace lay below elevated subway lines. Hot pink, baby blue, electric green and mellow yellow neon signs, all of them sporting an unfamiliar alphabet, evoked an eerily dreamlike yet noticeably fading version of the glory found in Soviet propaganda movies from the 80s.
I stopped for a moment to ask for directions away from this bright, buzzing chaos and towards my destination. A balding middle-aged man with a thick Russian accent gladly provided me with the information I needed. I was mere minutes away.
I turned the radio dial again, settling on a station airing a retrospective tribute to Sly and the Family Stone. Sly’s smooth funk and soul was to accompany me on the last leg of my trek. The titular chorus to “You Can Make It If You Try” echoed through my speakers and given the unfamiliarity of the surroundings, those words were reassuring.
I rolled into Coney Island to the bombastic fanfare of the Family Stone’s brass section. The neighborhood’s architecture, its landmarks, its streets, they all bear the mark of faded glory. Much of the infrastructure, not to mention the iconic amusement park that many associate it with, was built during the 1920s as a symbol of the Jazz Age and its economic and cultural prosperity. What remains now is something of a derelict husk of that era. ‘For sale’ signs hang over the rusty metal shutters of various disaffected buildings, the streets are littered with beer cans and empty buckets of paint, the streetlights and electric shop signs are dying out, and through it all, Deno’s Wonderwheel spins on in the distance.
All of the subway lines leading to Coney Island converge at Stillwell avenue station. I had parked my car about a block away and walking by, I looked up to see a shiny metal train car arriving on the elevated tracks. Lit by the late evening sun and given a bright orange tint, the station and the arriving transport had an air of displaced modernity, like something you’d find in 1950s accounts of what the future would look like. Up ahead lied Coney Island’s iconic boardwalk: the neighborhood’s prime attraction and the main object of my curiosity.
The boardwalk along the beach was lined with a series of abandoned old buildings. I couldn’t help but think of the one-street shantytowns found in old Sergio Leone western movies. The windows were boarded up, the wooden sidings were stained, chipped and rotting and it seemed that no one had set food inside the shacks in decades. Overlooking the ghost town lay a few gigantic red sky-reaching towers, casting their elongated shadows on the miniscule houses below. The towers evoked gigantic antennas that had once been used to send important transmissions to far off places, but that now found themselves abandoned and useless: a testament to ideals long forgotten.
I reached the beach just as the sun was setting. Its brilliant orange light was ablaze at the exact point where the sky meets the sea. Filaments of yellow, red and orange streamed from that point, stretching across the blue-grey sky. The tide rolled-in violently with pitch-black waves collapsing onto the beach, alternately covering and then revealing the littered sandbank.
That night, even the beach seemed abandoned. A child’s yellow plastic bucket lay turned over in the sand. The air was nearly silent except for the variety of faint cartoonish noises emerging from the nearby amusement park. I stood in the surf for a moment, snapping pictures and taking in the scenery. As the light got too dim for my camera film’s speed to accommodate, I made my way back.
I left Coney Island to the tune of John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk’s collaboration recorded at Carnegie Hall. The tapes of that performance had been lost for nearly 50 years before they were unearthed and published. Much like that forgotten jazz energy was finally revealing itself through my speakers, Coney Island’s age-old wonders had been manifest that night.
