Parks and Wreck: Amusement and Anxiety at
Turn-of-the-Century Coney Island
In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, it occurred to a number of
members of the medical and social scientific communities, as well as urban
planners and entrepreneurs, that Americans weren’t having enough fun. In 1869,
the neurologist George Miller Beard diagnosed the culture at large with what he
called neurasthenia or nervous exhaustion, a condition brought on by the body’s
inability to accommodate the accelerated pace of modem life. Beard posited a
sort of nervous economy in which the demands of daily industrial life were
depleting the over-stimulated and over-stressed neurasthenic’s finite reserve of
nervous energy. With the urban industrial environment thus pathologized,
recreational spaces became sites for the rehabilitation of the enervated body and
spirit, a chance to literally re-create oneself by replenishing the vital forces
sapped by the work day and the general tumult of the urban experience. In New
York City, Frederick Law Olmstead’s Central Park interrupted the cityscape
with a pastoral sanctuary equipped with the curative powers of nature. However,
as the turn of the century approached. New Yorkers began to eschew the
centrality of Central Park for the more kinetic and tawdry charms of a new breed
of park emerging out on the margins of the metropole in Coney Island. As an
alternative to the comparatively sober practices of recreational retreat, the
immediate sensory feast of the amusement park sought not to elide the
challenges of a modernizing world but to collide with them.
This does not mean, however, that the amusement park abandoned the
project of recuperating the nervous subject. Coney impresario George Tilyou
actively promoted his enterprise’s restorative potential. In an advertisement
designed to attract patrons to the park, Tilyou claims that “those who desire and
need rest from the cares and anxieties of their daily avocations can here derive a
great benefit.”' In keeping with the medical language surrounding the discourses
of recreation and amusement, this paper proposes that a visit to Coney Island
was tantamount to an inoculation against the threat posed to the modern body.
Following Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that “[modem] man’s need to expose
himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him,”^ we
can see what we might call the work of play in the age of mechanical
reproduction as operating precisely on these terms. An investigation into the
buffet of amusements offered up at Coney Island reveals the degree to which the
amusement park approaches a kind of cultural orientation through disorientation
and stages the dangers of an increasingly technologized environment in a
contained space in order to mollify its nervous patrons and assure them that will
get home safely.
As Robert Snow and David Wright point out. Coney Island represented
“America’s first and . . . most symbolic commitment to mechanized leisure,”^