All did not go as planned. Ruvane, who was given the middle name Tide by his surfing-loving parents, found the turtles and the sharks and the big fish in the aquarium to be scary. “Let’s go,” he kept saying as we moved through the dark spaces, only pausing to smile at the friendly brightly colored little fish who reminded him of Nemo.

We were in and out of there in record time and proceeded to head up the ramp to the Coney Island boardwalk. I took a deep breath and filled my lungs with the familiar sea air. Having grown up in Long Beach, New York, boardwalks are in my blood. Just the thought of walking a boardwalk causes my pulse to race. As a child, I walked the two miles of Long Beach boardwalk a thousand times and biked them, too, on my blue-and-white Schwinn.

The smell of hot dogs and French fries overwhelmed me, so we headed to the food stands. The franks were slightly burnt (perfect) and the fries very greasy (perfect). We washed it all down with a soft ice cream cone, that swirl of who-knows-what that melts much too fast, leaving a trail of sticky spots on the weathered boards.

We stood on the boardwalk: on our left, the wide sandy beaches and the ocean; on our right, the new Luna Park. Ruvane raised his index finger and pointed in the direction of Luna, and we headed over to inspect the rides.

The first thing you notice when you enter Luna Park is that it is definitely not the right place for 3-year-olds. You have to be 3 feet tall to ride the Mild Thrillers by yourself and 4 feet to go alone on the Moderate and High Thrill Rides. You also have to be brave, very brave. The thought of twisting and turning in the air while strapped to a seat produces an almost immediate wave of nausea in me. Still, it was apparent, by the happy screams of children everywhere, on rides like the Air Race, where riders can soar and barrel roll, or the Brooklyn Flyer, where riders swing across the sky rising to nearly 100 feet above ground, or the Eclipse, a pendulum that swings you up to 50 feet with nothing below your feet, that they loved the gravity-defying experience.

Named for Luna Park, one of the original playgrounds in Coney Island that burned down in 1944, and erected on the site of Astroland, which occupied the site from 1962 to 2008, the new Luna Park includes 19  mechanical attractions (18 are currently operating) manufactured by the Italian company Zamperla. Eleven of the rides are designated family rides—including Tea Party, where you sit in an oversized tea cup and spin at your own speed, Wild River, where riders experience a refreshing splash down a 40-foot-tall chute (not yet open), and Circus Coaster, a classic family roller coaster. Sculpted of brightly colored fiberglass in Crayola colors, with metal structures, the rides are slick and sophisticated. Most last on average one to two minutes.

I returned on a Thursday afternoon in July, consumed a Nathan’s original hot dog and fries, and headed for Luna Park. It was not very crowded, and the chief customers were kids, either with their parents or grandparents or with counselors from local day camps. A group of kids in bright orange T-shirts stamped “Chabad Summer Adventures” raced from ride to ride. A grandmother from Belle Harbor, Queens, herded her brood of grandchildren, several of whom were visiting from Beit Shemesh in Israel. Wade Williams, a father from Queens, watched as his son Elijah, 12, and his niece Imani, 14, got on line for the Brooklyn Flyer. “This is stress free for me,” he said. “All I had to do was buy two 4-hour wristbands.”

Playland, circa 1950s.
Dr. Kenneth S. Tydings

The rides flooded me with memories of my Long Beach boardwalk childhood in the 1950s. Not because William J. Reynolds, a state senator and a real-estate developer, had developed Dreamland at Coney Island in 1904 and the Long Beach boardwalk, where construction began in 1908. Everyone I knew had heard the story of the herd of elephants that Reynolds allegedly marched into town as a publicity stunt to build the Long Beach boardwalk.

Not because the two boardwalks resembled each other. Long Beach and Coney Island couldn’t have been more different. There was no way to compare the huge Ferris wheel and the Cyclone Roller Coaster to Playland, the beloved kiddie-rides amusement park.

Still, they shared a certain dynamic. The boardwalk was entertainment. Rides, amusement arcades, food, and parades. During the 1950s, when we wore dog tags with our names, addresses, and religion, so that people would know where to bury us after the atomic bomb hit, the boardwalk was our escape. There was no Facebook and no Internet. Television programming and ownership were limited.

Both those who lived there year-round and those who rented in Long Beach (the population rising to almost 100,000 residents in the summertime) were drawn to the 2.1 miles of boardwalk that run from New York Avenue to Neptune Boulevard. Many of the summer visitors were middle-class Jews who rented houses and apartments or who returned regularly to their favorite rooms with ocean breezes in the big hotels—the Nassau and the Hotel Lincoln.

I spent several summers as the switchboard operator at the Hotel Lincoln. It was a family hotel run by Frances Powell, and most of the guests were Jews. Arthur Miller’s parents, Isidore and August, who had once been very wealthy but who lost their fortune in the 1929 crash, spent several summers there, as did doctors and dentists and accountants and several wealthy garment manufacturers. I knew, by heart, the phone numbers of their stock brokers, their offices, their doctors and dentists and, in some case, their mistresses. At the end of their stay, I was tipped liberally for my discretion. They would slip me an envelope with $50 or $100 dollars in it and thank me for my services. In those days, this was big bucks!

Shooting Gallery, circa 1950s.
Dr. Kenneth S. Tydings

But on the boardwalk, it didn’t matter if you were upper middle class or middle class or working class or had no class at all. The spectacle was free. You could stand at the side and watch people playing Seidel’s Skeeball even if you didn’t have the money that it cost to play. You could root for your favorite dog at the greyhound arcade, where the mechanical dogs lurched forward as the contestants hit the levers and watched the balls pop up in the air and land in boxes. The winner was the person whose ball landed in the right box enough times to have his dog reach the finish line first.

If you did have some change in your pocket, you could play Skeeball and squirrel away prize coupons until you could actually get something worth taking home: a made-in-Japan Kewpie doll, a child’s bisque tea set with blue flowers, a fan inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and if you were a really good player and saved the whole summer, a pink Bakelite clock radio, covered with poodles. You could play Rapp’s Rollo Ball or visit the Penny Arcade. You could shoot guns at the Sportmen’s Gallery, which provided free instructions and “rifles for ladies.”

With just a little bit of money—nickels and dimes, maybe a quarter—you could ride in one of the kiddie rides in Playland at Edwards Boulevard, by the beach. There were the red wooden boats, smelling of a coat of fresh paint, that moved around in a circle in water barely two feet deep, the choo choo train with bells and whistles that took you on a journey to nowhere, the roller coaster, the Ferris wheel, and the whippet—all just the right size for children.

You could buy a Jerry’s knish, “made on the premises,” or a kosher hotdog from the Hebrew National deli or a frozen custard from Waller’s. Or an ice-cold Coke in a bottle from the red coke machine. “Please place empties here,” said a sign on the wooden stand next to the vending machine.

Every August, orphans from all over the metropolitan area descended on the Long Beach boardwalk for a day at the beach. Often dressed in borrowed, ill-fitting bathing suits, the orphans would hit the sand as the lifeguards stood watch on their towers. The surf was rough, rip tides were frequent, and many of the kids did not know how to swim.

We locals understood the power of the ocean. You couldn’t fight a rip tide. You had to give in, let yourself be pulled out, if you had a chance. You shouldn’t swim near the jetties, or you would be sucked into the rocks and cut to pieces.

The boardwalk was escape, entertainment. But the ocean was for real. You had to take it seriously. The waves crashed against the shore, and the hurricanes moved up the coast throughout the 1950s, lifting homes off their foundations, flooding streets and basements, and washing away precious sand.

But the boardwalk concessions and the arcades and the kiddie rides remained, surviving the harsh weather and the storms. In the end, they fell victim to a change in taste: Long Beach and the Catskills lost out to Paris and London and Rome. The big hotels were converted into nursing homes and mental-health facilities.

Luna Park today.
Shael Shapiro

And, while there are promising efforts to resuscitate Coney Island, with its new Luna Park already open and with the projected Coney Island Revitalization Plan to create an indoor and outdoor amusement park and entertainment district moving forward, the Long Beach boardwalk remains a shadow of its former self. There are no rides. No arcades. No food stands. Local residents, especially the new condo owners who live near the boardwalk, are vehemently opposed to bringing back the honky tonk. Doing that, they say, will only devalue their property.

I have little sympathy for them. For me, the Long Beach boardwalk was as close to heaven as a lapsed Jew like myself will ever get. Part fantasy, all escape, it remains indelibly imprinted on my Jewish neshama, alongside matzo and marror.

Roslyn Bernstein is a professor of journalism and creative writing at Baruch College, CUNY, and the author of Boardwalk Stories, a collection of 14 linked tales set in the years 1950 to 1970.

This winter, however, this winter of wind and recession, of job loss and housing loss—this winter when Coney Island has been almost entirely dismantled—I was depressed, I was angry and so, ventured into the forbidden: I was going to keep a winter diary, recording what it was like to live and read and write in New York’s favorite summery playplace when even that fantasy was vulgarly dying. I was going to record every razed lot and shuttered business, noting the neighborhood’s daily despoiling, as Thor Equities, LLC, which had already bought most of Coney’s most prominent properties, effectively evicted, through exorbitantly raising rents, their longtime tenants, leaving the neighborhood barren until the city approved Thor’s plans for redevelopment, though redevelopment funds were becoming, in the phrase of one local newspaper, “increasingly scarce.”

My Coney diary was begun just after Labor Day, off-season’s official beginning: September 7. That was the bright breezy Sunday that Astroland, Coney’s largest amusement park, a late heir to the defunct Dreamland, Luna, and Steeplechase Parks, closed its gates forever. Astroland’s owner, Carol Albert, had sold her property to Thor in 2006 for $30 million; in 2007, she was denied the renewal of her park’s lease for the two years she’d requested, so Astroland had to shut down. The Alberts are, or were, a venerable neighborhood presence: West 10th Street at the boardwalk is named for Dewey Albert, who founded Astroland in 1962; ever since Thor began buying up Coney almost five winters ago, daughter-in-law Carol has served as an unofficial spokesperson for local businesses.

Thor is headed by Joseph Sitt, a local boy made good (he’s from Gravesend, the neighborhood just north), and a developer who’s always talked big plans: over the past two years, he’s been inundating the mayor’s office and media with plans for Coney retail, a megamall with restaurants, high-rise condos and hotels and, of course, “an improved amusement district.” But such optimism is as old as the Atlantic. Even before the market collapsed and banks began faltering, naysayers held their naysayings at city council meetings, in rallies and open letters, and over the Internet. Skeptics maintain that Sitt has always intended to sit on his Coney properties, waiting for them to appreciate before flipping them for profit. And he appeared to do just that with the Gallery mall at Fulton Street: in 2001 he bought that Brooklyn property for $24 million, launched a PR campaign touting redevelopment, persuaded the city to rezone the area to permit the necessary construction, then sold the plot in 2007 for $125 million without realizing a single plan.

But now that our economy has gone runaway rollercoaster, what might have been a nefarious plot—sitting/flipping—is turning into incontrovertible reality: call it Sitt’s sit without the flip.

Thor has lately hung banners on its properties—on the facade of Ruby’s Bar on the boardwalk, along the chainlinked fences that once perimetered the demolished batting cages and go-cart track—advertising them available, and urging prospective lessees to call “Sam Sabin,” (212) 529-7413. I have called this number three times, two while drunk, and left appropriate messages: “Hello, Uncle Sam, this is Coney calling. Can I rent a room in your conscience?”

Besides the scripts of prank calls, my diary records: the prices of the Astroland amusements Albert was hoping to liquidate (the Astrotower, that shaky white space needle, was listed at $99K; the carousel came with a tag of $95K, while the Tilt-A-Whirl seemed a steal at only $29K); the early January removal of the iconic Astroland rocket from the top of Gregory & Paul’s boardwalk concession; the later January announcement of a city plan to “demap” Coney’s streets, essentially retaking a number of the neighborhood’s unsafe properties through condemnation.

As I conceived it, this Coney diary of mine would be aggressively particularistic. Nothing would matter except the local. There would be no Manhattan. No Iraq, no Israel either. There would be no Obama. New condo construction in neighboring Brighton Beach stopped the week of the election; the partly finished buildings stand emptily windowless, while local homeless have moved in. On Inauguration Day, I counted 10 used condoms on the beach at Ocean Parkway, prophylactics in every cheap color and design (not the “Coney Island Whitefish” of yore so much as ribbed jellyfish, tickler jellyfish, and that most beautiful species of condom that, with love, glows in the dark, which brings to mind a favorite term from high-school biology, “bioluminescence”). Somewhere between election and inauguration—symbolically, during the transition—my across-the-hall-neighbor died; she left me a plastic bag of silver dollars.

My diary was going to be that and more—journalistic, but literary, a way to survive a cool apartment in a neighborhood just entering its blight—but it wasn’t to be. Its discipline faded when rent needed to be paid, and the dark days felt too short for sadness. Failure, taking the form of a low cloudbank, hangs over this island (to wit: Coney’s not even an island; it used to be, but then Manhattan landfill was poured into the creek and paved over, making Brighton Beach Avenue). My diary’s first paragraph was, in fact, an inversion of this essay’s: “People write about Coney Island to avoid living in Coney Island. People live in Coney Island to avoid visiting Coney Island. And what of the people who visit Coney Island? They visit Coney Island to avoid reading about Coney Island.” Indeed, doesn’t it seem, nowadays, that reading is the most dangerous, ill-advised thing one can do?

Fearlessly, then, wrapped in blankets in bed, I read everything I could of and about Coney, particularly its literature, its fiction, because anything—even the false, even the fake, the sentimental, the nostalgically kitsch—was better than outside.

Here’s my hawk: no other New York neighborhood boasts Coney’s literary history. America’s best writers coupled its locus to raucous themes, spanning genres from Beat poetry to beat reportage, in languages from English to German, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish. As Coney was once a vacation spot—back in the original-recipe Depression, in the days before kids’ television and Disney parks, before widespread car ownership and inexpensive air travel—its literature has always been one of writers on-leave, basking in the childhood fantastic by noon, and the libidinous by dusk. Coney’s appearance in the chapters of novels and in the stanzas of poems especially represents an intrusion of magic into worldweary realism—just as the actual neighborhood once indulged not only the practical urban escapist, but also the malevolently playful surreal, or irreal. When a writer machinates his or her characters to Coney, it’s no mere journey by subway, or quaint streetcar: it’s a regressus, as the page becomes an unlimited admission ticket to subconscious Guignol.

I read: Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift and Joseph Heller’s memoir Now and Then; the journalism of Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman (Crane’s Coney Island’s Failing Days tells us that New Yorkers thought Coney was going to hell as early as 1892); Djuna Barnes; Edward Dahlberg; Henry Miller; Kenneth Fearing; Lawrence Ferlinghetti (whose poetry collection A Coney Island of the Mind approaches the place not physically, but as glittering metaphor); Richard Fox’s “Coney Island Frolics”, a report about Coney bathing, appearing in the Police Gazette in 1883; accounts of Sigmund Freud’s Coney tour in 1909; an illuminative treatment of Coney as capitalist grotesque, in Boredom, an essay by Maxim Gorky from 1907; Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, an architectural manifesto positing Coney as imaginative testing ground for Manhattan’s later skyline reality; Wallace Markfield, who wrote about Brighton’s argumentative Jews; José Martí’s Spanish crónica, Coney Island; O. Henry’s Brickdust Row; Upton Sinclar and Theodore Dreiser; Grace Paley (Enormous Changes at the Last Minute) and Delmore Schwartz (In Dreams Begin Responsibilities), Hubert Selby, Jr. and Gilbert Sorrentino; Harvey Swados and Sol Yurick; and Yiddish’s Isaac Bashevis Singer, onetime resident of Coney’s furthest neighborhood, Seagate.

I wrote this list down in the diary notebook, which soon became just another notebook—ocean-gray, seagullishly shabby—as I began copying excerpts from these selections into it, too. It is revealing that Coney’s literature shares a similar technique: Much of it is made of lists, of breathless listings as long as the boardwalk. It is as if writers about Coney were agape with wonder at how much of the world could be found in one neighborhood, and, overwhelmed, could only try to note down, telegraphically, or in shorthand, the variety of what attracted their senses. In this, and in the notion that a democratic multitude used to come together all in one place, time-encapsulated in its prime—the essential meaning of “A Coney Island of the Mind”—Coney’s literature can also seem diaristic; though its diary is a daybook of a collective ideal, and, too, of an idealistic summertime, to be read by the light of the sun that, these days, feels so distant.

Here, then, is a refresher of this neighborhood’s never-was perfection, from that most perfect of Coney stories, Bashevis Singer’s “A Day in Coney Island”(1970):

I had been in America for eighteen months, but Coney Island still surprised me. The sun poured down like fire. From the beach came a roar even louder than the ocean. On the boardwalk, an Italian watermelon vendor pounded on a sheet of tin with his knife and called for the customers in a wild voice. Everyone bellowed in his own way: sellers of popcorn and hot dogs, ice cream and peanuts, cotton candy and corn on the cob. I passed a sideshow displaying a creature that was half woman, half fish; a wax museum with figures of Marie Antoinette, Buffalo Bill, and John Wilkes Booth; a store where a turbaned astrologer sat in the dark surrounded by maps and globes of the heavenly constellations, casting horoscopes. Pygmies danced in front of a little circus, their black faces painted white, all of them bound loosely with a long rope. A mechanical ape puffed its belly like a bellows and laughed with raucous laughter. Negro boys aimed guns at metal ducklings. A half-naked man with a black beard and hair to his shoulders hawked potions that strengthened the muscles, beautified the skin, and brought back lost potency. He tore heavy chains with his hands and bent coins between his fingers. A little farther along, a medium advertised that she was calling back spirits from the dead, prophesying the future, and giving advice on love and marriage.

We should no longer read this passage wistfully. Not dwelling amid yesteryear’s warmth, we should instead be jolted by the cold Coney of today. We might repeat, each in our own disappointed voice, the sentence that ends Singer’s paragraph: “I wasted my days with dreams, worries, empty fantasies, and locked myself in affairs that had no future.”