Hey Lou, When Are They Bringing Back the Old Coney Island?
No matter where we go, no one asks me how it was in the five hospitals this year, they just remember me as an old-time Coney Islander, but we remember ourselves as a survivor -Thank God.
In excerpts from the book we’ve not yet written, there are pages of memories. My beloved parents carried their first child east, to a Mermaid Avenue apartment, while dad had a new store built, just opposite a small wooden Mermaid Avenue church, Our Lady of Solace. It was our first journey, half way across America, from my South Dakota birthplace.
One year later, we moved into our brand new apartment, one floor above Dad’s men’s shop called Powsner & Abel. It opened in 1923 and closed some seventy-one eventful years later.
We got the child’s room, the bed close to the rear window, that looked out on Railroad Avenue, where the Norton’s Point Trolley ran from West 37th Street at the foot of Sea Gate, all the way to West 15th Street, where it then ran up-hill to the Stillwell train terminal complex.
One block south, the Surf Avenue trolley ran center-avenue from West 36th Street to West 8th Street, where we might transfer to other trolley routes.
On the surface Coney seemed tranquil until you hit the midways – there the action dripped in wilder funland side streets and lairs.
In bold sunlight, our older cousins combed the crowded, giant parking lot, next to the RKO Tilyou Theater. The lot was packed with autos, where my cousins came running to tell us, “We saw one license from Iowa, another from Idaho, We thought only Indians lived there.”
Across Surf Avenue in front of Ravenhall Baths was our favorite soda-stand, it had a giant smiling Eskimo on top. When you asked for a frozen pie, they lifted the cover, and smoked ice fumes arose, as “a pie” was lifted out. That was our piece of Coney Heaven, sill remembered eighty years later.
But there were deeper roots to old Coney Island – even more memorable. As kids we didn’t know too much about the “jernts” posing as taverns; saloons in the heart of the noisy belt where the more professional action reigned.
Stauch’s was the popular spot then. It had a tavern with live music and a barker ‘popping’ out. “C’mon in a dime a dance watch em hoppin.” It was the call of the wild, with beer flowing like rainwater. Some dance taverns had hotel rooms convenient for over heated dancers.
Then there was the sedate, like Feltman’s where old man Handwerker once toasted hamburgers and franks until he opened his own “stand” a short 2 blocks beyond and made his Nathan’s hot dogs a national pastime.
Nathan’s packed them in from day one. “What’s the secret of your French fries? We asked years later. “Mazola oil” was the secret, he answered.
During the roaring twenties and through the rigid depression, his fries, hot dogs and burgers were a stalwart nickel – even when the depression changed the music that rocked America and Coney Island, playing Brother Can You Spare a Dime?
That too hit Coney island. Investors had just built and opened a beautiful new salt-air studded Half Moon Hotel, a full block along Coney’s more residential Boardwalk.
It had modern rooms, a sparkling dining room with two major catering halls – all just in time to face the national disaster that skidded America and Coney into a depression.
Throughout the depression, winters would bring more fires to the decadent amusement area. Many rides and bath houses would perish in mid-winter flames.
Both Steeplechease Park and Luna Park where the prime “battleships” of the Coney Island fleet until – Luna Park died circa 1946. Fred Trump was there like a hungry wolf waitin’ to build housing, while four blocks west Steeplechase Park was to last some ten years more before demolition put an end to that era.
