A la fin des 70’s, Coney Island était propice à la déambulation mélancolique percutée par des rencontres un peu surréelles avec le grotesque dans une ambiance qui a visiblement perduré jusqu’à aujourd’hui.
REQUIEM FOR A DREAMLAND: Kevin Baker on Coney Island’s Grand Past and Grim Future
by Kevin Baker The Village Voice
They’re getting very near the end now at Coney Island. They’ve been tearing pieces off the place for years, and soon the bulldozers will be back again, pushing over the last, weathered links to the past on Surf Avenue.
Next to go this spring will be the old Bank of Coney Island, and the Shore Hotel, and the Grashorn Building, which goes all the way back to 1889. They’ll take down what’s left of Henderson’s Music Hall, where they once put on shows the size of Broadway productions and where Harpo Marx made his stage debut.
A strip of faceless new buildings will replace the battered old ones, and the stands, with their small operators still holding on inside them, selling fast food and rides and games and T-shirts, will be replaced by … new stands selling fast food and rides and games and T-shirts. Then these new buildings will be torn down in turn, sometime in the next two or three or five or 10 years, and from their rubble will rise the new Coney Island, one that will be bigger and better and more exciting than it ever was before. Or so the story goes.
Reblogged from lostangelesca with 24 notes / New York Coney Island Long Reads
