Pretty much all routes through Brooklyn, as already indicated, lead to
Coney Island, the barren strip of white sand, clinging to the southern
edge of Long Island, about ten miles from New York, which is the
objective point of the populace when in sweltering summer weather they
crave a breath of sea air. The antiquarians of the island insist that
it was the earliest portion of these adjacent coasts discovered, and
tell how Verrazani came along about 1529 and found this sand-strip,
and how Hudson, nearly a century later, held conferences with the
Indians on the island. But however that may be, its wonderful
development as a summer resort has only come since the Civil War. It
has a hard and gently-sloping beach facing the Atlantic, and can be so
easily and cheaply reached, by so many routes on land and water, that
it is no wonder, on hot afternoons and holidays, the people of New
York and Brooklyn go down there by the hundreds of thousands. Coney
Island is about five miles long, and from a quarter-mile to a mile in
width, being separated from the adjacent low-lying mainland only by a
little crooked creek and some lagoons. It has two bays deeply indented
behind it, Gravesend Bay on the west and Sheepshead Bay on the east.
The name is derived from Cooney Island, meaning the "Rabbit Island,"
rabbits having been the chief inhabitants in earlier days. The Coney
Island season of about a hundred days, from June until September, is
an almost uninterrupted festival, and nothing can exceed the jollity
on these beaches, when a hot summer sun drives the people down to the
shore to seek relief and have a good time. They spread over the miles
of sand-strip, with scores of bands of music of varying merit in full
blast, minstrel shows, miniature theatres, Punch and Judy,
merry-go-rounds and carrousels, big snakes, fat women, giant, dwarf,
midget and pugilistic exhibitions, shooting-galleries, concerts,
circuses, fortune-tellers, swings, toboggan slides, scenic railways,
and myriads of other attractions; lakes of beer on tap, with ample
liquids of greater strength; and everywhere a good-humoured crowd,
sight-seeing and enjoying themselves, eating, drinking, and very
numerously consuming the great Coney Island delicacy, "clam-chowder."
To the clam, which is universal and popular, the visitors pay special
tribute. This famous bivalve is the _Mya Arenaria_ of the New England
coast, said to have been for years the chief food of the Pilgrim
fathers. Being found in abundance in all the neighboring waters, it is
served in every style, according to taste. As the Coney Island "Song
of the Clam" has it:
"Who better than I? in chowder or pie,
Baked, roasted, raw or fried?
I hold the key to society,
And am always welcome inside."
The long and narrow Coney Island sand-strip may be divided into four
distinctive sections--a succession of villages chiefly composed of
restaurants, lodging-houses and hotels, built along the edge of the
beach, and usually on a single road behind it. In the past generation
the rougher classes best knew its western end or Norton's Point, a
resort of long standing. The middle of the island is a locality of
higher grade--West Brighton Beach. Here great iron piers project into
the ocean, being availed of for steamboat landings, restaurants and
amusement places, while beneath are bathing establishments.
Electricity and fireworks are used extensively to add to the
attractions, and there is also a tall Observatory. The broad Ocean
Parkway, coming down from Prospect Park and Brooklyn, terminates at
West Brighton Beach. East of this is a partially vacant, semi-marshy
space, beyond which is Brighton Beach, there being a roadway and
elevated railroad connecting them. Brighton is the third section, and
about a half-mile farther east is the fourth and most exclusive
section--Manhattan Beach. Here are the more elaborate and costly Coney
Island hotels. In all this district the power of the ocean is shown in
the effect of great storms, which wash away roads, railways and
buildings, and shift enormous amounts of the sands from one locality,
piling them up in front of another. Huge hotels have had to be moved,
in some cases bodily, a thousand feet back inland from the ocean
front, to save them, and immense bulkheads constructed for protection;
but sometimes the waves play havoc with these. Very much of the money
spent by the visitors has to be devoted to saving the place and
preventing the wreck of the great buildings. But this does not worry
the visitors so much as it does the landlords. On a hot day the vast
crowds arriving on the trains are poured into the hotels, and swarm
out upon the grounds fronting them, where the bands play. Here the
orchestras give concerts to enormous audiences. The piazzas are filled
with supper-parties, the music amphitheatres are crowded, and
thousands saunter over the lawns. As evening advances, the blaze of
electric illumination and brilliancy of fireworks are added, and the
music, bustling crowds and general hilarity give the air of a splendid
festival. The bathing establishments are crowded, and many go into the
surf under the brilliant illumination. Not a tree will grow, so that
the view over the sea is unobstructed, and out in front is the pathway
of ocean commerce into New York harbor, with the twinkling, guiding
lights of Sandy Hook and its attendant lightships beyond. What a
guardian to the mariner is the lighthouse:
"'Tis like a patient, faithful soul
That, having reached its saintly goal,
And seeing others far astray
In storms of darkness and dismay,
Shines out o'er life's tempestuous sea,
A beacon to some sheltered lee,--
The haven of eternity."
The tall Observatory, on its airy steel framework, rises three hundred
feet to overlook the wonderful scene. When the top is reached, the
first impression made is by the dissonant clangor of the many bands of
music below, heard with singular clearness and much more intensity of
sound than on the ground. This discord ascends from all sorts of
structures, generally having flat pitch-and-gravel roofs, forming a
variegated carpet far below. Coney Island stretches along the ocean's
edge, with the lines of foaming surf slowly rolling in. To the
eastward, at Brighton and Manhattan Beaches, it bends backward like a
bow, with semicircular indentations where the sea has made its
inroads. To the westward, the curve of the beach is reversed, and the
extreme point of the island ends in a knob having a distinctive hook
bent back on the northern side. Behind the long and narrow strip of
sand there are patches of grass, and much marsh and meadow, spreading
away to the northward, and meandering through the marsh can be traced
the crooked little tidal creek and series of lagoons separating Coney
from the mainland. Far away northward runs the broad tree-bordered
Ocean Parkway, with the hills of Prospect Park and the tombs and
foliage of Greenwood Cemetery hiding Brooklyn, and closing the view at
the distant horizon. Various railways stretch in the same direction,
some crossing the bogs on extended trestle-bridges. Many carriages are
moving and thousands of people walking about in the streets and open
spaces beneath us, while upon the ocean side the piers extend out in
front, with their steamboats sailing to or from the Narrows to the
northward, around the knob and hook at Norton's Point. Far south over
the water are the distant Navesink Highlands behind Sandy Hook and the
low adjacent New Jersey Coast, gradually blending into the Staten
Island hills to the westward. Around from the south to the east is the
broad and limitless expanse of ocean, where, in the words of Heinrich
Heine:
"The cloudlets are lazily sailing
O'er the blue Atlantic sea."
Far to the eastward, seen across the broad Jamaica Bay, are more low
sandy beaches, each with its popular resort, though all pale before
the crowning glories of Coney Island. There is Rockaway, with its iron
pier and railway connecting with the mainland to the northeast, also
Arverne and Edgemere, the distant cottage-studded Long Beach, and the
hazy sand-beaches of Far Rockaway. And as we gaze over this wondrous
scene down by the water side, the freshening wind gives a pleasant
foretaste of old ocean, and recalls the invocation of Barry Cornwall:
"The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
Without a mark, without a bound,
It runneth the earth's wide regions round.
"I'm on the sea! I'm on the sea!
I am where I would ever be,
With the blue above, and the blue below,
And silence wheresoe'er I go.
"I never was on the dull tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more."