1960s The Boardwalk Before It Changed Forever - Coney Island, NY

1960s The Boardwalk Before It Changed Forever - Coney Island, NY For generations, a trip to Coney Island meant getting on the subway and riding to the end of the line. Families from all over New York, from the Bronx, from Queens, from Manhattan, packed into the cars on summer days to get to the ocean. And newlyweds from Brooklyn walked out onto the boardwalk as if the whole city belonged to them. You bought a hot dog at Nathan’s for a nickel and walked the boardwalk until your feet hurt. You stopped to watch the Cyclone drop from the top of its wooden hill, the screams carrying all the way to the sand. In the afternoon, a crowd stood looking up at the Parachute Jump dropping people from 250 feet. And when Luna Park was new, 1,300,000 electric lights blazed every night on the Brooklyn shore, while a boy from the Lower East Side rode the Steeplechase Horse again and again for a few cents. The crowd on the beach and the Cyclone are still there, but the world around them has never stopped changing. Dreamland burned in 1911 and no one rebuilt it. Luna Park burned in 1944 and became empty land. Steeplechase Park, where millions had laughed on the backs of wooden horses, turned off its lights for the last time in 1964, and then a man named Fred Trump bought it and tore it down to the foundation. And the land beside the boardwalk, where Robert Moses had promised to rebuild for the people, became high-rise public housing and parking lots.