See this story at BrooklynDaily.com.
By Lou Powsner
Brooklyn Daily
Once upon a time, in the year of 1923, these eyes saw the Coney Island Boardwalk for the first time from our carriage seat. That night, Dad pushed my carriage up hill on the fresh wooden ramp under the new bright lampposts which were illuminating the boards.
The fresh wood smelled just like new-fallen trees. It was very late in December, and Mom and Dad walked to the Boardwalk from our new home, an apartment on Mermaid Avenue, fresh from my birthplace in South Dakota.
“Light up the night” seemed the title of that serene scene! Serene? Yes. But so many were gaping at so much that was new.
Steeplechase Park bordered the Boardwalk. Its unusual concessions were an overwhelmed group of bumper car rides and freshly popping corn with a buttery aroma piercing the early winter air. Crowds flocked the new concessions to see where the world’s youngest — and newest — performers each sat in its own crib — the miraculous “incubator babies.”
Visitors pierced their solitude as they sucked their milk form their rubbery nippled bottles — so content, so cute, and so sparkling new and so happy to smile, or cry, for all the visitors.
Connected to the gigantic Boardwalk was Steeplechase Pier. All through the night, men (mostly) were cutting bait, changing hooks, and selling fresh fish out of their productive pails and barrels. The salt air was full of cigarette, cigar, and pipe smoke. Midnight was sparkling and alive in the refreshing sea air in the newest community of a busy city.
Soon to open near there were the subway routes to Manhattan. New concessions opened near the outer end of the pier where they sold, coffee, tea, and beer to the people taking part in the all-night activities.
In time, the Iron Steamboat Company brought ferries to Bay Ridge and the city at Park Ferry that connected to Iron Steamboats that went upstate as far as Albany, the so-called state capitol.
New York had grown, and Coney Island was a leader. This was so, until bad luck led the parade.
Coney Island was a seasonal community. Bad economic times and unemployment came during the depression, changing the economic direction, while Wall Street was hit by havoc and market crashes.
End of season finds “too often discarded, too very many seasonal occupants who were the source of too many short-lived funny places that flew by night.”
This is Lou Powsner.
World War II veteran and famed Mermaid Avenue haberdasher Lou Powsner has been Speaking Out for Brooklynites since the 1950s. Read his column monthly on BrooklynDaily.com.