Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2008 | Page 123

CONTRIBUTORS 119 In the popular contemporary discourse surrounding the initial decades of Coney Island, however, the threat posed to the park patrons’ abstract humanity was superseded by the more immediate and legible threat to his nervous well being and general corporeal integrity. The attendant ironies of a weekend getaway to Coney Island were not lost on Rollin Lynde Harrt, whose caustic critique of the amusement park in The Atlantic Monthly in 1907 asks, what more ludicrous and what more sad than the spectacle of vast hordes of people rushing to the Oceanside, to escape the city’s din and crowds and nervous strain, and . . . courting worse din, denser crowds, and an infinitely more devastating nervous strain inside an enclosure whence the ocean cannot possibly be seen? . . . “Never tell me again the Americans are a nervous people!” They are, though, and yonder amazing institution proves it. Manhattanit