‘Visions of an American Dreamland’: New book and Brooklyn Museum exhibit highlight Coney Island
My parents first took me to Astroland, the amusement park at Coney Island, when I was 6 years old. The place terrified me. I told my father I never wanted to go back — and he told me I was a sissy. To this day, I believe he was secretly relieved; I had seen his face turn white (we were belted into one of the two-person canvas seats) on the Parachute Jump. My mother, on the other hand, who had been a WAC in World War II, showed us both up; she immediately went back for a second jump with her sister, my aunt Violet, a former WAVE.
These memories are occasioned by the publication of a dazzling, dizzying new book/exhibition catalog “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008.” The catalog accompanies the exhibition of the same name, which opens this Friday at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition was conceived and organized by Robin Jaffee Frank, chief curator and Krieble curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, where the exhibit started its run in January. (Jaffee Frank, not incidentally, is a Brooklyn native.) Via email, I asked her about the genesis of the exhibition: “As a child, I had wondrous and strange experiences at Coney Island … My family and I still go there and we believe in its never-ending potential for magic … [This is the] first exhibition to look at the site’s enduring status as a muse for artists, from its rise in popularity as a seaside resort in the Civil War era through the closing of its space-age amusement park, Astroland, after decades of urban decline.”
As the gorgeously printed catalog makes abundantly clear, the exhibition is not to be missed. I predict “Jurrasic World”-like lines snaking along Eastern Parkway when the show opens. There will be a lot of buzz and I think it will be a “must-see” for most New Yorkers. The “Jurrasic World” analogy is deliberate: from 1861, when it opened, until 2008, when the analog world started turning digital, Coney Island was the real-life equivalent of a Hollywood tent-pole blockbuster. Before there was “Bruce,” the shark in JAWS, there was Topsy the Baby Elephant; in a 1903 public execution-by-electrocution (watched by an estimated 1,500 people), Thomas Edison’s camera crew filmed the cruel spectacle. As Charles Musser and Josh Glick, just two of the many distinguished contributors to the catalog, explain “The film, shocking in its brutality, has sparked an urban legend in which inventor Thomas Edison is said to have arranged for the execution of Topsy as part of a commercial rivalry that pitted his direct current against Westinghouse’s alternating current.” In her catalog chapter “Requiem for a Dream” (the title of which she takes from Coney Island-born director Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 film), Jaffee Frank quotes poet laureate W.S. Merwin’s mournful reflection on Topsy’s execution from “The Chain to Her Leg” (2010): “If we forget Topsy/Topsy remembers…When we forget/The lit cigarette/The last laugh gave her/Lit end first/As though it were a peanut/The joke for which she/Killed him/We will not see home again.”