In telling the story of the decade he spent living in Paris, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Zweig offers an original take on a classic American myth—the myth of Paris, that sensual, liberated city where good Americans are said to go when they die. At the same time, Zweig probes behind the romance of Paris to examine the dark motives that led him—the solitary child of a Brooklyn Jewish family, raised in the shadow of the Holocaust—to reinvent himself so thoroughly as a Parisian. From the ages of 20 to 30, Paris was his “visible identity,” but his “bones,” Zweig suggests, were always Brighton Beach: “As a foreigner [in France], I felt my connections to others were flimsy, unserious. I could choose to set aside this labored character who spoke French, and lapse into my secret otherness as a boy from Brooklyn, living near that other beach, Brighton Beach, where the language that escaped me wasn’t Italian or French but Yiddish.”

Lambert Strether, the hero of Henry James’ The Ambassadors and the archetypal American in Paris, summed up the city’s lesson in a famous phrase: “Live all you can! It’s a mistake not to.” From the very first pages of Departures, it is clear that Zweig has taken this advice to heart—and that for him, as for so many American before and since, “live” is really a euphemism for another four-letter word. “I don’t remember how I met Claire for the second time,” the book begins, but Zweig does remember how “for weeks after that, we made love almost anywhere we could get our clothes off. … When we made love, Claire would seem to bend into a depth, holding her breath and reaching, and then, with a helpless gulp, find what she had been reaching for, and expand.” Years earlier, Claire’s older sister Arlette had been his first lover in Paris; in between he was married to Michele, a Communist painter. And then there is Anna, a new widow, who comes to Zweig for sexual solace: “We were castaways adrift on a raft of coarse white sheets. We hadn’t chosen each other, but our ship had gone down, and here we were trying to salvage ourselves. Anna buoyed me up with her pure, nervous will. ‘I’m already dead, Paul,’ she would say. ‘I’m not here, not alive.’ ”

It’s no good denying that this way of writing about sex, which dominates the first third of Departures, now feels rather embarrassing—at once mannered and awkward, prurient and religiose. In his foreword, Gopnik aptly compares Zweig with John Updike, another writer born in the 1930s who made a cold poetry out of sex. Both grew up in a culture still vestigially Victorian, only to find that the wide-open sexual regime of the bohemian 1950s and 1960s was a new, perpetually intoxicating world.

Today, when sex has no secrets even to most teenagers, we have much less patience for Zweig’s kind of sublime swooning: “She lived for that grateful gulp at the bottom of her flesh; and I adored her.” What is more striking is the way Zweig’s fascination with sex seems to grant him no access at all to the inwardness of his partners. Arlette, Claire, and Michele have no real life on the page; they are stylish, seductive abstractions, more like figures in an Antonioni movie than like characters in a novel, or people one might know in real life. “You were there, Arlette, in all your forbidding deliberation, like a nun,” he writes, with the kind of rhetorical flourish that seems more natural in French than in English. “I could see you clearly unbuttoning your plaid dress and folding it on the chair in my room; I could see you unhook your brassiere, like Jeanne d’Arc preparing for the flames.”

The first section of Departures focuses on Zweig’s final weeks in Europe as he prepares to end his 10-year sojourn and return to America (where he would become a professor at Columbia and then Queens College). The man we meet in these pages is Zweig’s evolved persona, the product of a decade of self-invention—a libertine intellectual, an expatriate who has no roots and casts no shadow. It is telling, then, that the main drama of this section is Zweig’s struggle with a sudden, unprecedented bout of impotence, which destroys his relationship with the gulping Claire. “I was … a sexual fool, a partial man. My personality had become unraveled.”

Clearly, the impending end of Zweig’s exile is connected to the disappearance of his freewheeling potency. It is as though the self he created in Paris has burst like a bubble, revealing how insubstantial it was in the first place. “I myself had become strange: a Gallic ghost walking the streets of Paris, with my fraudulent but accurate French,” Zweig writes. Indeed, he comes to feel that the very ease with which he mastered French is suspicious, the sign of an essential rootlessness. “You speak French so well, it is uncanny, even unhealthy,” says his friend Witold Gombrowicz, the great Polish novelist. “It seems to me that you are a modern-day wandering Jew, someone who doesn’t have a home, and doesn’t want one.”

In the second section of Departures, Zweig begins his story again, hoping to understand the origins of his own ghostliness. “I was brought up as a child of silence,” he writes, a silence intimately connected to Jewishness and to the Holocaust, which was taking place across the ocean while he grew up on Coney Island. “The enormous killing of the war seemed to have no content in my neighborhood of brick tenements and aging three-family houses,” Zweig remembers:

they never talked about the Holocaust. In my house, it was present as a silent bewilderment, and a struggle to be cheerful. I remember it, I suppose, as a lack of light in the various apartments we lived in, or as a sagging in my grandmother’s face. To be a Jew, when I was a boy, was to be unhappy, unspeaking; it was to live within an invisible limit.

Is it any wonder that such a childhood should produce a man impatient of all limits, who taught himself to speak freely in another language? What matters is less the factual accuracy of Zweig’s recollections—he notes that he remembers nothing about large swaths of his childhood, including the birth of his younger sister—than the psychological truth his memories are trying to tell him. (Departures is a book written under the sign of Freud, and Zweig is clearly a veteran analysand: When impotence strikes, he turns not to a doctor but to a therapist, who blames his Oedipus complex.)

One of his strongest early memories, from the age of 3 of 4, is of wandering off on the beach by himself and feeling no fear: “Was I lost? I didn’t think so. I was happy, alone.” His life in Paris, Zweig suggests, was another way of being happy and alone, unencumbered by possessions or relationships: “The deeper I slipped into French … the more certainly I knew, in some chamber of my heart, that my bags were packed.” It is as though Zweig were compelling himself to prepare for, or atone for, the refugee’s life of uncertainty and expulsion that was led by so many Jews in the 20th century.

Indeed, the contrast between his own idyllic life as an American Jew in Paris and the deaths of so many Jews in the same city just a decade earlier, is a constant, largely unspoken theme in Zweig’s French memories. It helps to explain the adventure that dominates the later part of Departures: Zweig’s reckless, uninformed embrace of Communism, which led him to become an underground supporter of the FLN, the terrorist group then seeking Algeria’s independence from France. When Zweig opens his apartment to Daniel, an FLN agent on the run from the police, he is clearly trying to reenact the not-so-distant days of the Occupation, when Jews and resistance fighters hid from the Nazis. It is a way of casting off the safety of his American identity and passport, of reclaiming the danger and ephemerality that Zweig associates with Jewishness: “I thought of Trotsky, the Russian Jew, who had made a silence of his past. … I too was abstract, although I lived only on the edge of action, a voyeur.” Nor was he the only one engaged in such psychic role-playing. There were seven people in his cell of FLN sympathizers, Zweig writes, and “the odd thing is that we were all Jews, all seven of us.”

In the end, Zweig did return to America, and to a conventional career as a writer and teacher. None of that experience figures in Departures, however. Instead, the book concludes with a brief, shocking postscript, in which Zweig recounts the diagnosis of cancer that he received in his early forties, and the struggle with sickness and dread that dominated his last years. Working under a maddeningly indeterminate death sentence, Zweig comes to feel that the writer’s dream of posterity is just that, a dream. “I saw that a writer’s immortality exists in the moment of conception, in which language has seized hold of him. … A work is not a life, but writing is living, and now especially I wanted to live with all my might.” In the pages of Departures, he still does.

• Turkey seized an Iranian plane en route to Syria that turned out to be loaded with weapons. [JPost]

• The right-wing blogosphere is accusing journalists David Corn and Chris Matthews of making and laughing at, respectively, an anti-Semitic joke. To call the charge “flimsy” is an insult to flimsy accusations. [Mediaite]

• Julian Schnabel talks Miral with the Times. Very good interview. [NYT]

• Gene Simmons of Kiss has no interest in your Israel-boycotting. [AP/ABC]

• After defeating the traditionally Jewish-affiliated Ajax Dutch soccer club, a player on another team chanted anti-Semitic slogans. He has since apologized. [JTA]

Sonic comes around to the fact that Coney Island is no longer what it used to be—and therefore that Coney Island hot dogs shouldn’t be, either.

Coney Island and the Jews have a long history together. “Nathan’s Famous” hot dog founder, Polish-Jewish immigrant Nathan Handwerker, set up his first shop on the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues, practically introducing the European sausage to New York society. The strip’s growing industry attracted rising Jewish entertainers such as Harry Houdini and the Marx brothers, and even Irving Berlin worked there as a singing waiter.

Jews also frequented Coney Island as guests and audience members, clamoring in the bath houses and dominating the busy handball courts. Famous Jewish criminal Abe Reles was kept under constant guard by six policemen at the Half Moon Hotel in the early 1940s.

The area has made a dent on Jewish literary and film culture: The All-of-a-Kind Family book series paints a picture of life on the shore in the summers, people looking for a brief respite from hot city life. Joseph Heller (Now and Then, 1998), Neil Simon (Brighton Beach Memoirs, 1983) and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Enemies: A Love Story, 1972) all grew up in or visited the local neighborhoods, and detail what the everyday looked like by the amusement park’s shows and the consequent social milieus. Recent Oscar-nominee Darren Aronofsky shows the area’s more sordid side in his Requiem for a Dream (2001).

Which brings us to the present: In 2009, Jewish mayor Bloomberg and his administration rezoned the 19-block Coney Island strip and bought seven more acres with the goal of developing more hotels, amusement parks, and housing units. We’ll see what cultural gems this Jewish-Coney Island history chapter produces.

Former Coney Island Roller Coaster Is For Sale [WSJ]

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.

The New York World-Telegram called Martin “the Blimp” Levy “the most meat which ever stepped into a ring.” Other papers used the “miniature mastadon” and the “Boston pachyderm.” Discovered in the mid-1930s working as the fat man in a Coney Island side show by wrestling impresario Jack Pfefer, Blimp tipped the scales somewhere between 600 and 700 pounds. Nobody knew exactly how much he weighed because normal scales couldn’t contain him. With the larger men in the mat game weighing in somewhere between 200 and 300 pounds, the morbidly obese Blimp, with his ample corpus and bug eyes, was one of the first freaks in professional wrestling.

But freaks were his manager’s specialty: Pfefer made wrestlers in his stable shave their heads or grow huge antennaed mustaches. He also brought in grapplers like the acromegalic Swedish Angel, christening him “the ugliest man in the world” and guaranteeing that ladies in the audience would faint, men would shout, and children would cry upon laying eyes on him.

Just as there was there was heavy Jewish participation in boxing during the early part of the 20th century, so too were there Jews in pro wrestling. Long before Bill Goldberg became the champ of the WWF in the late 1990s, Jewish toughs such as Harry “the Jewish Bad Boy” Finkelstein and Abie “Hebrew Hercules” Coleman were mixing it up in rings across the country, sporting Stars of David all the while.

Raised in Boston, Levy was a big boy from early on. He weighed 200 pounds at his bar mitzvah and was over 350 by the time he got to high school. He played football for a short time, but was asked to leave the team after falling on opponents and breaking the legs of several linesman. In a 1946 Washington Post interview, Blimp described his unusual dietary regimen: “Some mornings I eat a dozen eggs, and then again, sometimes only two. Sometimes I eat six pounds of steak, and then I might eat a pound.” He also admitted to going on an occasional mashed potato binge, requiring a half bushel of spuds, two quarts of milk, and a pound of butter.

In spite of his massive bulk, the Blimp was surprisingly nimble. Paul Boesch, one of the only wrestlers of the Golden Era of the 1930s and ’40s to write a cogent autobiography, wrote that his first impression of the Blimp was that he was simply a pituitary case who won his matches by falling on his opponents, immobilizing them with his enormity. That may be partly accurate. But Boesch noted that the Blimp suspected the other wrestlers considered him a no-talent fat man, and one day in a locker room, he was challenged to kick a small metal can which dangled from the ceiling about six feet off the ground. In an attempt to show off his athletic prowess, the Blimp gingerly approached the can, brought one of his monstrous, fleshy, tree trunk-like legs up high into the air and tapped it with his foot. The other wrestlers were amazed because they couldn’t do it themselves without falling on their asses. It became evident that Blimp Levy wasn’t a run-of-the-mill, morbidly obese wrestler: he had skill. He was, as his manager insisted, “a freak with class.”

Outside the ring, the Blimp was said to have a voracious sexual appetite and regaled peers with stories of his conquests. A kind of Semitic Pantagruel, he was characterized by Boesch as “a seething volcano of sexual passion.” While his conquests were not elaborated upon (thankfully, perhaps), the Blimp married multiple times, usually women far younger than he. In 1946, he wed 18-year-old Charlotte Jones, a woman half his age, in Dallas. A few years before that, 24-year-old-Juanita Thomas was so eager to get hitched to the Blimp that she neglected to obtain a divorce from her previous husband or to inform her newly betrothed that she had been married. This little fact came in handy when, in 1945, she tried to squeeze alimony payments out of poor Mr. Levy. Moreover, he testified in court—after having been shoehorned into the witness stand—that little Ms. Thomas physically abused him. In the end, the court had mercy on the Blimp and ruled against Juanita.

In spite of that victory, bad luck trailed the Blimp. In 1946, the Connecticut State Athletic Commission revoked his license on the recommendation of physicians, who said he was in poor health. Even his manager opined he was so fat that he would probably drop dead in the ring. But all was not lost; the Blimp wrestled abroad. In Malaysia, a Singapore-based promoter lined up Harnam Singh, Son of Kong, and the 6-foot-10-inch Da Ra Singh, among other famed South Asian behemoths, and offered the Blimp $2000 plus travel expenses and accommodations. But perhaps the most attractive clause in his contract had to do with an unlimited supply of food to throw his weight around the subcontinent for six months.

In spite of the mockery he endured, the Blimp was a pretty good wrestler. He defeated Tor Johnson, the Swedish Angel, and Nature Boy Buddy Rogers, names familiar to anyone who went to wrestling matches in the 1940s and 1950s.

But by the end of his career, around 1950, Blimp’s health truly did begin to fail. Astoundingly, the incidental exercise provided to him by his profession had helped him keep somewhat trim. When he quit wrestling and dropped from sight, he really ballooned. At his death in an Alabama trailer park at 56, Blimp weighed 900 pounds and had a 120-inch waistline. Take 10 steps, turn around and look at the spot where you started: that was the final measurement of Blimp Levy’s waist.

It may not seem so, but, in a certain time and place, Blimp Levy was famous, world famous. He performed in front of thousands of people regularly, fans gasping upon seeing his blubbery mass as he lumbered up the steps into the wrestling ring. They howled when he quite literally crushed an opponent. He was a major attraction that brought in legions of fans. But like many such characters who inhabit the liminal world between sport and entertainment, where abnormality is a virtue, the Blimp has been lost to history. With Jews of this magnitude so few and far between, it is a value simply to know of him.

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.”