Product Description

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Coney Island was the uncontested epicenter of America's emerging mass culture. It was the quintessential American resort: the birthplace of the amusement park, the hot dog, and the roller coaster. Its history is one of breathtaking transformation and re-invention. Celebrated for its glittering amusement parks and its enormous crowds, it was in times past a mecca of grand hotels, race tracks, beer gardens, gambling dens, concert saloons, and dance halls. A new mass culture began to take shape there. Its harshest critics decried it as Bedlam by the Sea, but others deemed it a necessary outlet for the masses where the democratic spirit was granted free rein. Despite its precipitous decline, Coney Island remains a metaphor for the American amusement industry and the hundreds of honky-tonk resorts and amusement parks it has spawned.

Coney Island: The People's Playground is the first new history of Coney Island in almost half a century, tracing its evolution and cultural impact from its earliest development as a seaside resort to the present day Mermaid Parade. Presented in a photo-documentary format featuring more than one hundred vintage photos, archival material, personal accounts, and contemporary sources, the book evokes the atmosphere of the resort as experienced by those who visited it during its heyday. Through the reminiscences of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, literary figures, and amusement historians, Michael Immerso traces Coney Island's remarkable evolution and subsequent decline, while at the same time examining the remarkable individuals and complex social forces that contributed to its rise and fall.

Coney Island is not merely a documentary of the amusement industry or the story of a fabled amusement park, but rather a narrative of the way Americans, and particularly immigrants and urban Americans, came to regard the pursuit of leisure as part of their national birthright.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #185126 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Review
"A Gray Line tour of Coney Island -- historical, informative..." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

"An excellent tribute to working America's first Disneyland." -- Alphonse Vinh's Musings, National Public Radio

"The best comprehensive history of the resort from the late 1840s to the present." -- New York Archives Magazine

A comprehensive look back at this metaphor for America's infatuation with amusements and amusement parks. -- Daily Record

Definitive history of Coney Island takes you for a nostalgic ride. -- Star Ledger, Newark, NJ, 11/30/02

Immerso's writing is fluid and seamless, producing one of the best basic primers of Coney's chronology. -- Brooklyn Go, 12/28/02

Part history book, part pop culture examination, part sociology report, "Coney Island"...is as enjoyable as...well, an amusement park. -- Worrall Newspapers

Tells you everything factual you need to know about the place, and the stills alone are worth the cover price. -- Palm Beach Post, 12/15/02

The most detailed and insightful account yet of New York's Coney Island. -- American Studies International (October 2003, Vol. 41) Richard Longstreth

This generously-illustrated homage to and history of a major manifestation of pop culture is bound to grab your interest. -- Boston Herald, Friday August 29, 2003 (Editor's Choice)

About the Author
Michael Immerso is a writer, cultural historian, publicist, and social activist who has worked in collaboration with many of New Jersey's leading cultural and educational institutions as a curator and designer of cultural programs. He is the author of Newark's Little Italy: The Vanished First Ward (Rutgers University Press) and a co-producer of a documentary film based on the book.

Customer Reviews

Carry Me Back To Old Coney Island
In this excellent book, Michal Immerso meticulously traces Coney Islands' wild history, from its origins as a sandy haven for rabbits to its development as the most spectacular amusement area on earth to its slow and sad decline.
Although this book would be right at home on a coffee-table, readers should know that they will be getting much more than photographs and anecdotes of Old Coney. Immerso's book is fairly serious in tone and crammed with details: I found myself wishing that I had a map of the area before me, so I could trace all the comings and goings of all the attractions that graced the three spectacular parks of Coney Island--Dreamland, Luna Park, and Steeplechase. Immerso also tracks the development of the main streets, the hotels, the great migrations of immigrants (still continuing today). He writes about the destructive fires that regulary swept through large swaths of Coney Island, noting in great detail what was destroyed in each and what grew each time from the ashes.
My favorite sections dealt with the amusements themselves--the many roller coasters (the evolution of which is carefully traced), the carrosels, The Trip To The Moon, Over and Under The Sea, and emporiums with great names such as the Pavillion of Fun and Wormwood's Dog and Monkey Circus.
If I have any criticism, it's that Immerso has given us too much, for in addition to this exhaustive history, he tackles even more ambitious territory: what it all means in the context of the American experience. No doubt Coney Island provided a template for the mega-amusement/entertainment industry that was to develop in its wake. But it also was one of the first, true, democratic vistas, where millions of Americans from every ethnic group have rubbed elbows on one stretch of beach for more than a century. This anarchic democracy born of sand and fun has, according to Immerso, left a profound imprint on the American consciousness.
My only real regeret is that Immerso did not include a time machine and ticket to transport me back Luna Park to see, hear, feel, and taste for myself the thousand-and-one delights of Coney Island on a summer night in the early 1900s.

Boring!
"The People's Playground" is a major disappointment. This book was billed as a "new history" but is nothing more than a tired rehash that reduces coney Island to a boring cliche. The writing is pseudo-academic and stilted. Except for a few notable exceptions, the photographs are archival shots published in previous articles and books. The static design and the muddy photo-reproduction ruin the book's few good photographs. The captions are long-winded and set in all capital letters, making them hard to read. The book looks self-published. Most of the information contained within is gleaned from "Good Old Coney Island," "Sodom by the Sea," and "Amusing the Million. The author does not present an original idea or insight. What this author doesn't know about Coney Island could fill a book, and that's exactly what he's done.

Not Just a Pretty Face
I just got Michael Immerso's book on Coney Island as a gift to remind me of the excitement and magic I felt when I visited there. I was delighted to get a coffee table book that was not just slick, but edifying as well. I felt justified in this delight as the pictures were given weight by the academic tone of the narrative explanations. Although I hoped for a bit more colorful "sleeze" in both the pictures, and the descriptions, nevertheless I'm not disappointed. I feel both my need for visuals as well as story have been satifactorily met.