Coney Island

The Coney Island Parachute Jump: Night and day you are the one

Eye on Real Estate

January 31, 2018 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle
At night, Coney Island's Parachute Jump puts on a light show. Eagle photos by Lore Croghan
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Night and day you are the one.

The Parachute Jump has us singing this Cole Porter tune because we just got an up-close look at the light show it puts on after sunset.

The defunct but dazzling Coney Island boardwalk ride has 8,000 colored LED — which stands for light-emitting diode — bulbs that pulse in flashing stripes and zigzags. They brighten the night in dramatic fashion.

If you sit on a bench on the boardwalk on a winter evening, it feels like those lights are shining just for you, as we discovered on a recent visit to the seaside neighborhood.    

The light show, which cost $2 million to set up, made its debut in 2013. It replaced a more modest light display.

The Parachute Jump, which is an individual city landmark, looks pretty great in the daytime, too.

It hasn’t been a functioning ride for a half-century.

When it was, it had parachutes with double seats hanging from its 262-foot-tall tower.

The seats and parachutes are long gone. But the unique steel tower and umbrella-shaped crown that remain standing today are beautiful.

The Parachute Jump’s nickname is “the Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn.” But it originally stood in Queens at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

The Parachute Jump was moved in 1940-1941 to its present location on the boardwalk.

 

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