Coney Island: New York's Playground, Dreamland
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- čas přidán 31. 07. 2009
- Dreamland, described as the "Gibraltar of Coney Island", was the last of Coney's great amusement parks of the early 1900's. Its fiery demise in 1911 began the slow decline of the amusement area.
I heard about this when one night when I was watching a show called "Mysteries At The Museum" at my grandmother's house.
i honestly don't know about the existence of genuine blueprints for any of the original coney island amusement parks, but you may be able to find a sanborn fire insurance map of the area if you search. if you're in nyc, i think you might be able to find hard-copies of sanborn maps at the main nypl research library. thanks for watching!
Every single Worlds fair type small cities like these with the beautiful archatecture the buildings with huge towers and spires with huge ponds and fountains senter square you could even ride boats with electric motors around in and entire city was lit up with an ammount of light bulbs never seen before each one hosting a technology never seen before. Every place very soon after it was built also had horriable fires or were torn down after a couple of years. And it wasn't just the incubators on display but real live premature babies fresh from the hospital who would have most likely died because they had no such equipment. SEeeeEEE THE TINY BABIES Only 25 cents. Saved Thousands of babies lives. Some went home and some got on the Orphan train without a name. Crazy times
wow! dreamland/ coney island/ astro land. Reminds me of my childhood.. and my parents childhood... and my grandparents childhood.... We used to go to Brighton Beach then to Dreamland/ Astroland at nite. I was there recently (not in dreamland as that burned down), but in coney island, and it felt like a ghost town -it's not the same...
Thanks for your wonderful Coney Island posts. It's hard to avoid concluding that people had the ability to have more fun before cellphones.
1400deadwood has it right. I'd go there too. We must start to designate some places as "historical" and preserve them.
I've been to Coney Island, in college a friend and I would spend a couple hours out there before we had to go to work. Went out there in winter to get Nathans hotdogs as a sort of demented tradition with a few college friends. But I had never even heard of Dreamland until I read a book recently (Escaping Dreamland by Charles Lovett) that included Dreamland. For that era, it must have been a breathtaking experience.
thanks so much for your kind words!
@janissary211 yes, they can! though i am dissappointed about some of the zoning changes, the new luna park looks like such fun and the entire area (amusements and residential) really deserves to be given more attention.
thanks much for your kind words!
the singer is Henry Burr, the version recorded in 1910. you can find it on the Internet Archive. the spoken version is one of the narrators, Robert Berliner.
there certainly is an element of tragedy associated with Dreamland, especially with the fire which consumed it. if you're in nyc, i hope you had a chance to see the dreamland bell which was recovered off the shores of coney this past summer.
the coney island of today is very different from the one of yore. i honestly believe if there had been enough care taken with the area, things would be better all around (for the amusements AND for the residential zone as well). thanks much for sharing your comment!
honestly i think the only place it can viably be "re-built" is online, and (though don't quote me on this) i'm sure someone in secondlife has probably done so. i *do* think it could be re-built physically, but one would wonder to what point other than for nostalgia's sake (and to make me very, very happy!). if it was re-built, i can pretty much guarantee it'd be made of more fire-proof materials ... thanks for watching!
Read Alice Hoffman's book "the Museum of Extreordinary Things" Very good story of Coney Island and Dreamland fire.
I agree. It's changing though, supposedly - it's now under development, I heard. Anyway, we have a whole bunch of coney island pictures from the 1940's and up - from when my parents were around 5. And the place is so different - it was more crowded back then, don't you find?
Thanks for the history
Do you think its possible for Dreamland to be rebuilt? Expecally with our technoligy today? Question is... If someone were to rebuild Dreamland. Where would they relocate it?
Ethel Malley, do you know the song "Coney Island Baby" written and sung by Tom Waits? Being a Coney historian I'm sure you've heard them all, but I truly love this particular song.
Fascinating
Fantastic footage! I wonder who is singing the "Dreamland" theme song . . .