Vanishing New York Backup

It is 1996 and I’m in love with Coney Island. I’m in love with its decrepit, ancient buildings, crumbling but also vibrating with color and life. Ice cream, cotton candy, corn dogs, fried clams. I’m in love with the smell of grease and seashore. The feeling of being at the edge of the world. On the margin. Way out there. Beyond. And I can’t get enough of the freaks. I go to Sideshows by the Seashore to see their 10-in-1 show. Zenobia, played by Jennifer Miller, is the bearded lady. She wears plain clothes, pants and a shirt, no makeup, nothing theatrical. The focus is her beard, thick and woolly, a bit wild. With her long wavy hair, she looks, if not like Jesus, then one of the apostles. A hippie. She goes through her spiel: "I am a woman with a beard,” she announces. “If I called myself The Bearded Lady, I would be claiming that I, Zenobia, was the one, the only, woman with a beard in the entire world. The Bearded Lady. Could that possibly be true? Of course not. The world ...

I went out to Coney Island on New Year's Day and it was good to see all the oddballs again. I used to love to go out there, but I don't anymore, though New Year's Day was an exception. It made me think about all the colorful characters we used to see in the East Village, before the life was sucked out of the neighborhood, and I was thinking especially of Baby Dee . Here's something I wrote sometime back in the 1990s: One hot afternoon I took the train out to Coney Island to see the Sideshows by the Seashore. I got off at Brighton Beach and walked out under the shadowy roar of the El, bought a hot knish at Mrs. Stahl’s , and then followed the boardwalk to Coney, past the old Russians playing chess, and one lone trumpeter blowing his song to the sea over the stretch of sun-bright sand. Coney was jumping with the summertime crowds, a giddy throng of sweaty bodies, half-naked, sticky with ice-cream drippings and cotton candy, tipsy on cheap beer. I passed the Cyclone, t...

Today, when you arrive at Coney Island and emerge from the train station, instead of the grand old Henderson Building , the first thing you see is the global chain candy store IT'SUGAR, topped with a billboard from which mega-developer Thor Equities (misspelled "Equites") welcomes you, as if Coney Island belonged to them. Which, actually, it does.   When IT'SUGAR opened this spring, The Brooklyn Paper reported that their CEO declared that customers would choose his shop over nearby old-timer Williams Candy because of IT'SUGAR's "sleek, trendy vibe and jumbo, novelty-size boxes" of big-brand candies like Nerds and Snickers. So how do the two compare? Local, family-run Williams Candy has been here for some 75 years . When you walk into their comfortable old shop, you are welcomed by the most wonderful aroma, a powerful mix of chocolate, roasted nuts, popcorn, and candy apples--which they make onsite by hand. The place is warm and inviting....

If you haven't yet seen the movie Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride , you absolutely must. I won't take no for an answer. And you're about to get your chance-- the movie will be playing at IFC Center in the Village for a one-week engagement starting August 9 . Zipper tells the harrowing true tale of corporate and political greed as Bloomberg, real-estate developers, and other vampires battle for control over one of the city's last authentic places. I asked the film's producer/director, Amy Nicholson , a few questions: Q: What do you think was Coney Island's importance to the people of New York, and to the meaning of the city? Do you think it still holds the same importance today, after its gutting? A: For more than a hundred years Coney Island has been near and dear to the hearts of New Yorkers and people from around the county and the world, in spite of her many ups and downs over time. Coney had become hugely important sometime around th...

Reader Philip Shelley turns us on to a great find--from the NBC/Universal Film Archives, originally shot for NBC News, it's a whole bunch of 1970s stock footage of the city. Click here to watch Part One --it includes Times Square, a quiet part of town compared to today. The silent, shuffling crowds go by, only the sound of their feet making noise. The streets are more subdued, and they're also sexier with their 1,001 Danish Delights, porn houses that offer a "box lunch," sidewalk barkers drumming up customers for the "anything goes" psychedelic burlesque. The footage moves along. Sixth Avenue is desolate. No crowds. The whole city seems a bit hushed. Until you get to total pandemonium at what looks like Bethesda fountain in Central Park--people riding bikes and rowing boats in the water. You'll also find rare scenes in the old Children's Zoo. Click here to watch Part Two , which goes from Harlem to Brownsville to the South Bronx, de...

If yesterday's post on the downfall of Coney Island at the hands of Applebee's got you down, cleanse your palate with this little ditty from Air Supply. It's 1982's "Even the Nights Are Better" and it's all filmed in Coney Island. There's Gregory & Paul's ... ...There's Spookarama and Dante's Inferno, too. And a whole lot of white suit action. Watch here:

This past weekend, the Applebee's of Coney Island had its grand opening, unveiling a giant shark tank filled with amusement park miniatures, including a neon Wonder Wheel and Cyclone. The tank was made by Las Vegas' Acrylic Tank Manufacturing company, stars of a reality television show called Tanked , in which two guys make large, elaborate fish tanks, e.g., a 57,000 gallon aquarium for a Dallas megachurch and a "man-cave aquarium" for an NFL player. photo: Coney Applebee's Facebook page Next weekend, the international chain restaurant, that honey-glazed, Fiesta lime-flavored emblem of the suburban dining experience, will throw a Mermaid Parade Party in collaboration with Coney Island USA. Tickets to the party are $45 and they'll give you entry to Applebee's "comfortable air-conditioned dining room" for drinks and an all-you-can-eat buffet in the "ambiance of the hottest new restaurant" in Coney Island. What is wrong with ...

On a hot summer day in 1987, join Michael Musto and friends for a graffiti-splattered subway ride from (unrecognizable) Union Square to (recently demolished) Coney Island. It's another gem from filmmaker Nelson Sullivan . When artist Albert Crudo gets on in Bensonhurst he tells of "these horrible girls" on the platform who commented on his gender presentation: "It's a guy! It's a guy!" Musto passes the time by defacing images of 1950s Hollywood starlets. Today they'd be hipsters. But it's not today. It's the '80s. And, look, it's the Loew's Oriental movie palace--shuttered in 1995 and turned into a Marshall's . When they finally arrive at their destination, the glimpse of Coney's ghosts might break your heart.

It's a lazy, end-of-summer, holiday week, and that means...reruns! I'll be revisiting some of my personal favorite posts here this week. Today, go back to Coney Island's World in Wax Musee . Costa Mantis' full-color photos of this ghoulish treasure of lost Coney Island cannot be missed. You'll see Hickman the Fox dismembering little Marion Parker in a bathtub! Husband-killing seductress Ruth Snyder of Double Indemnity infamy! And Lina Madina, the baby who gave birth to a baby. They're here, they're real, they're not alive! photograph: Costa Mantis, 1981

One bit of authenticity that still exists at Coney Island, that hasn't yet been destroyed by politicians and developers, that won't soon be replaced by a suburban mall pretzel kiosk or an up-market sports pub designed to murder the human soul, is the Williams Candy Shoppe . For about 75 years it's been going strong and now it's the last old-fashioned candy shop in Coney Island. It got that distinction when Philip's Candy Shop was shuttered by the city in 2001 after 70 years of business. Philip's was the first thing you saw as you exited the subway at Stillwell and emerged to Coney, passing windows full of frozen chocolate-covered bananas and giant lollipops. It was a thrill, a kind of visual and olfactory appetizer for what was to come. Now, if I recall correctly (but who'd bother to remember?), the first thing you see is a Dunkin Donuts . Philip's Candy Shop The Williams Candy Shoppe is not so centrally located. It's sort of tucked...

Coney Island's old Playland is losing its letters. One by one as the years go by. Summer 2010 They're mid-century neon letters. One has to wonder if they're being taken by ordinary vandals or by Coney Island history buffs terrified that this, too, is about to vanish. Summer 2011 In Forgotten New York , Kevin Walsh tells us that Playland began in 1930 as Silver's Penny Arcade. It was run as Playland from 1957 until it closed in 1981. Horace Bullard bought it and left it to rot. The ruin's guardian was a man named Andy Badalamenti . He recently passed away . A small tribute to him hangs on the fence outside Playland. For a peek inside the ruins of Playland, see photos by Lindsay Wengler and Nathan Kensinger .

My last drink at Ruby's on the boardwalk at Coney Island. I don't have much to say about it. It's been here, "a Brooklyn treasure," since 1934. After this summer, it will crumble under a corporate tsunami, along with the rest of the boardwalk. How can I ever go out there again?

Assuming Hurricane Irene didn't suck Zamperla out to sea, there's not much time left to say goodbye to Coney Island as we've long known it. We all know the devastation that is coming after this summer. The company that Bloomberg has handed this city treasure over to has a vision to make the place " refined, cleaner ...with sit-down restaurants and sports bars." And so everything on the boardwalk, except Nathan's and Lola Star, will be bulldozed. They want to turn it into a place where you can "sit in nice comfortable chairs and have a nice cappuccino or ice coffee." Sitting down is key. So is niceness. "Nice" is an epidemic that's killing the city . What will "nice" look like at Coney? It's already arrived. We've got a good idea of what's to come thanks to the new Luna Park's Cyclone Cafe . It looks like it was born from a plastics extruder, a cookie-cutter design with none of the joyful messiness of Co...