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Coney Island, Brooklyn

Inspired by the growing popularity of civilian parachuting and towers constructed to teach the military correct technique. Commander James H. Strong's Parachute Jump was erected for the 1939-40 New York's World's Fair in Flushing Meadow. As detailed by Elwyn E. Seelye & Company, the 170-ton tower stands 262 feet tall, a height exceeded at the fair only by that of the famous Trylon.

It was considered to be an engineering feat. The mechanisms within the tapered steel structure permitted fair visitors to ride to the top and safely descend, two-by-two, perched on a seat beneath a parachute. The exhilarating ride provided the couple with an unsurpassed view of the fairgrounds. After the closing of the fair, the Parachute Jump was purchased by the Tilyou. brothers and moved to their Steeplechase Park, Coney Island's most famous and longest enduring amusement park. Steeplechase had bean founded by their father, George C. Tilyou (1862-1914), whose enterprises at the turn of the century helped to revive Coney as a wholesome family resort.

Steeplechase was closed in 1964; however, the Parachute Jump continued to function until 1968. Still a prominent feature of the Brooklyn skyline, today the tower stands unused, but in fundamentally sound structural condition.

The History of Coney Island
Coney Island has played a part in the history of New York since the first days of European exploration, when Henry Hudson docked his ship, the Half Moon, off its coast in 1609. Lady Deborah Moody and forty followers settled Gravesend, the area north of Coney Island, in 1643; she bought the island itself from the Canarsie Indians in 1654. Not until 1824 did the Gravesend and Coney Island Road and Bridge Company build a shell road from the thriving center of Gravesend to what is now West 8th Street on the island.

Along with the commencement of steamer ship service from New York in 1847, this improved access allowed about a half dozen small hotels to spring up by the 1860s. During this period many famous Americans rusticated there: Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Walt Whitman.

But the nature of vacationing at Coney Island changed quickly during the 1870s, when several railroad companies began service from Brooklyn; the completion of F.L. Olmsted's Ocean Parkway, a designated New York City Scenic Landmark, also provided a comfortable route for carriages. Grand hotels and restaurants accommodated the mostly well-to-do visitors, who came to enjoy not only the ocean and cool sea breezes but also the amusements which were transforming Coney into the most famous family park among its American counterparts.

A festive atmosphere was ensured by the transferral to Coney Island of structures from the dismantled Centennial Exposition which had been held in Philadelphia in 1876.

Coney Island developed into "America's first and probably still most symbolic commitment to mechanized leisure.The island increasingly became the site for technologically advanced structures such as the balloon hangar, elephant-shaped hotel and observatory (built in 1882, it became an unofficial symbol of American amusement parks), and the Iron Pier (1878) which housed many amusements.

Mechanically-driven rides were pioneered at Coney,, one example being LaMarcus A. Thompson's Switchback Railway (1884), a precursor of the roller coaster. Most of these rides succeeded because they combined socially acceptable thrills with undertones of sexual intimacy.

Indeed, Coney Island, which earned the sobriquet "Sodom by the Sea," was "the only place in the United States that Sigmund Freud said interested him." As early as 1883, Coney's name was identified with entertainment, proven by the renaming of a midwestern park as "Ohio Grove, The Coney Island of the West."

Between 1880 and 1910 its three large and successful racetracks gave Coney Island the reputation as the horseracing capital of the country. In addition to gamblers, such features attracted confidence men, roughnecks, and prostitutes. Coney's many activities could be viewed from above in the three-hundred-foot Iron Tower (originally the Sawyer Tower at the 1876

Exposition). This most notorious phase of Coney's history ended around the turn of the century after many hotels burned down in fires during the 1890s and racetrack betting was outlawed by the state in 1910.

A movement led by George C. Tilyou to transform Coney's corrupt image introduced the idea of the enclosed amusement park to American recreation. By 1894 there were dozens of separately owned rides; but the following year Capt. Paul Boyton opened Sea Lion Park, a group of rides and attractions one enjoyed after paying an admission fee at the gate. During the next decade, Coney's three most famous enclosed parks opened: Steeplechase Park (Tilyou's own endeavor), Luna Park, and Dreamland, forming "the largest and most glittering amusement area in th

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