Red Grooms’s painting “Weegee 1940.” Credit 2013 Red Grooms/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Marlborough Gallery, New York
In the days when Coney Island was in ruins, there was a carny at the broken-down game arcade who would, to draw a crowd, sometimes have his schnauzer smoke a cigarette. This was in the 1980s, when a pet dog with a Pall Mall was probably not the strangest thing you could find at the park. Coney back then was a derelict dystopia of burned-out lights and empty rides and sea gulls lying dead beneath the boardwalk — a place of which the smoking dog’s owner once explained, “It’s an interesting kind of crazy.”
I thought about that man when I heard about a new show at the Brooklyn Museum, “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008”the first full-fledged exhibition to gather works of art inspired by the celebrated park. The show looks at Coney Island through its stylish rise, slow decline and eventual revival. In so doing, it asks a lasting question: Why is it that for 150 years this narrow coastal island has persistently provided “an interesting kind of crazy” to so many artists from so many eras, working in a variety of media and in vastly different styles?
Joseph Stella’s “Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras” (1913-14). Credit Joseph Stella/Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
“An amazing array of painters, writers, filmmakers and photographers saw Coney Island as a place to capture the American experience,” said Robin Jaffee Frank, the curator of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, which presented the show last winter before it arrived in Brooklyn, where it will run through March 13. “Like nowhere else, Coney occupies a singular niche in our imagination.”
To map the boundaries of that niche, Ms. Frank selected 140 objects — modern paintings, vintage photos, sideshow posters, an original wooden carousel horse — that testify to the interest in Coney Island’s blend of grotesquerie and glamour. The list of artists she included — Joseph Stella, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Red Grooms, Milton Avery, Diane Arbus — is a further testament to the island’s inexhaustible raw material.
Harold Feinstein’s “Coney Island Teenagers” (1949). Credit Harold Feinstein/Panopticon Gallery, Boston
What connects these creators is a shared enchantment with Coney’s densely layered personality. The park has always been a schizophrenic place that appears on its surface to concern itself with pleasure — with Ferris wheels, fortune tellers, swim suits, hot dogs and Venetian gondoliers. But woven through these amusements are strands of social history. Like Times Square or Bourbon Street, the island has a secret serious side: Beneath the bacchanal, it tells a sober tale.
That tale starts with the advent of industrialization in the wake of the Civil War. Despite the glaring hazards of the factory, many people saw their wages increase and their work hours decrease as the 19th century came to an end.
Reginald Marsh’s “Human Pool Tables” (1938). Credit 2015 Estate of Reginald Marsh/Art Students League, New York, via Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Coney Island emerged as a populist carnival where the masses could dispose of that surplus time and money. Unlike world’s fairs, which were largely meant to educate and elevate, the early parks at Coney — Luna, Steeplechase and Dreamland — were accessible attractions. Instead of installations on the progress of technology, there were dancing dwarves and deep-fried clams.
This democratic spirit — bursting at the seams with sugar, salt and sex — is neatly captured in Joseph Stella’s futurist painting “Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras,” which was the first work Ms. Frank chose for the show. The catalog quotes Stella saying that he wanted his canvas to “convey in a hectic mood the surging crowd and the revolving machines generating for the first time, not anguish and pain, but violent dangerous pleasures.”
Jared Leto on the boardwalk in the film “Requiem for a Dream” (2000). Credit Lionsgate
Some social critics like Maxim Gorky, a Russian writer who visited Coney Island in 1907, considered these crowds and machines a reflection of the capitalist system and Coney’s entertainments as little more than a meretricious balm for exploitation. But others of a less discursive bent embraced the island’s riotous ways and helped to grant the park its mythic status.“It is blatant, it is cheap, it is the apotheosis of the ridiculous,” Hampton’s Magazine reported in 1909. “But it is something more: It is like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone Park; it is a national playground.”
Milton Avery, “The Steeplechase, Coney Island” (1929). Credit The Metropolitan Museum of Art
No matter what it was, the playground expanded exponentially in 1920, when the subway was extended to Coney Island at more or less the same time that immigration to New York reached its peak. New arrivals from Rome or Moscow could now ride to the park for a nickel. In 1913, Coney drew a daily crowd of 350,000; 10 years later, when the boardwalk was completed, the crowds approached, and sometimes bested, a million a day.
The throngs and their diversity caused both panic and delight. It was around this time that the cultural critic James G. Huneker would write: “All Coney Island reminded me of a disturbed ant-heap, the human ants ferocious in their efforts.” A few years later, though, Giuseppe Cautela, an author of Italian descent, would answer in defense: “When you bathe at Coney Island, you bathe in the American Jordan.”
George Bradford Brainerd, “Negro Family, Coney Island, Brooklyn” (circa 1880). Credit Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection
Coney fanatics like Stella or Reginald Marsh, who painted New York City in the ’20s and ’30s, could not have missed these divisions of opinion. One of the best known works in the show is Weegee’s photo “Coney Island Beach,”from 1940. The anarchic image, in which a swarming multitude falls back from the camera almost out of sight, summons both Coney’s assimilative energies and the tumultuous disorder of Huneker’s human ants.
By the 1950s, with television spreading through the suburbs, the crowds at Coney Island started to diminish. Though the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel still stood, Luna Park, with its quarter-million lights, finally went dark in 1946. In 1964, Fred Trump, father of Donald, took control of Steeplechase Park. Planning to demolish it for luxury apartments, he organized a funeral where, in classic Trump style, bikini-clad women passed out stones to mourners, inviting them to throw the stones through the stained-glass windows of the Steeplechase pavilion.
Ralph Fasanella, “Workers’ Holiday — Coney Island” (1965). Credit Ralph Fasanella/American Folk Art Museum, New York
And so began the collapse of Coney Island, which was still apparent decades later when I met the smoking dog. Even at its low point, though, the park had its admirers. Anyone who visited Coney then knows that it possessed a dark charisma, a melancholy charm in which the boardwalk’s seediness was, at once, moodily present and a proof of what was lost. Ms. Frank acknowledged this nostalgia in the show with a snapshot of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and the musician Patti Smith, who once wrote of the park: “Nothing was more wonderful to me than Coney Island with its gritty innocence. It was our kind of place.”
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It was during this fallen era that a small group of artists was drawn to Coney Island by a wistful passion to restore its former glory. Chief among them was Dick D. Zigun, a playwright from the Yale School of Drama, who in the early ’80s moved into a rundown building near the boardwalk and founded the Mermaid Parade, a modern-day homage to the island’s old-time Mardi Gras parade, and the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, an updated (and often ironic) reimagining of the classic vaudeville act.
From these beginnings, Coney was reborn. Just a couple of years ago, a recreated Luna Park saw three million visitors in a summer. Around the same time, the B&B Carousell, an antique merry-go-round from Coney Island’s heyday, opened after major renovations. There are now new rides and movies on the beach and another generation drinking at Ruby’s Bar & Grill — even a second exhibition that documents how Mr. Zigun and his partners save the park.
Coney, after all these years, is back to what it was — and, remarkably, without the corporate style that has, for instance, affected Times Square.
“I don’t want there to ever be a Disneyfication of Coney Island,” Ms. Frank said the other day, “because in some sense Coney is an anti-Disney. There’s still this creative and rebellious spirit there — a kind of edgy magic that I hope is never lost.”
A version of this article appears in print on November 22, 2015, on page AR19 of the New York edition with the headline: The Cyclone! The Hot Dogs! The Art!.
