#lunaparc

Coney Island is located at the southern tip of Brooklyn and features one of New York’s most iconic beaches and an amusement area to include 50 or more separate rides and attractions. During the 19th century Coney Island became popular among the inhabitants of Manhattan as an escape from the overcrowded city. At first the island was a natural oasis apart from the rapidly growing urbanism of Manhattan. The main aspects of human culture occur however in relationships and function within a larger system, thus after being artificially severed from the mainland by a long tidal inlet (Coney Island Creek) Coney Island always existed in binary opposition to Manhattan.

As Manhattan grew and more people visited Coney Island’s beaches and recreational areas, it could no longer exist as a natural landscape and mutated to an increasingly artificial and vast urbanism. Between 1880 and World War II, Coney Island was the largest amusement area in the United States, attracting several million visitors per year. Thus the amusement parks that colonised Coney Island erased the natural in favour of a synthetic environment that could fabricate a variety of recreational sensations. In Delirious New York Rem Koolhaas refers to this phenomenon as ‘an urbanism based on the Technology of the Fantastic.’ The various elements of Coney Island: the Wonder Wheel (1918), the Cyclone roller coaster (1927) as much as the Parachute Jump (1939) were all examples of the Technology of the Fantastic, and those attractions intrigued the crowds to the same degree that they offended the advocates of high culture. Those who found Coney Island cheap, fake, and mediocre supported its eradication and its replacing with a park. Rem Koolhaas however argues convincingly that this solution would have been a weak substitute for the spontaneous urbanism of the masses.

At this time Coney Island functioned as a laboratory for Manhattan, experimenting with a new form of urbanism based on dreams, new technologies and the thrill of extreme emotions. In 1868 Frederick Savage an agricultural engineer from King's Lynn, devised a method of driving rides by steam: his invention, a steam engine mounted in the center of the ride, transformed the fairground industry. Technology, artificiality together with the abnormal and absurd were exploited as consumable alternative realities to be ritualised by the masses and unleashed on Manhattan with a new mass consumer culture to inhabit it.

Surf Avenue | Coney Island | Paul’s Daughter (since 1962) | March 2017

Luna Parc | Coney Island | Cyclone (1927) | March 2017

Deno’s Wonder Wheel Amusement Park | Coney Island | Wonder Wheel (1918) | March 2017 

THEORY AND FICTION

Delirious New York - A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan | Rem Koolhaas | Monacelli Press | 1978

The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | Scribner‘s | 1925

Requiem for a Dream | Hubert Selby, Jr. | Playboy Press | 1978