Coney Island

Part of the Series: American Experience

"It is blatant, it is cheap, it is the apotheosis of the ridiculous. But it is something more; it is like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone Park; it is a national playground, and not to have seen it is not to have seen your own country," said Reginald Wright Kauffman in 1909 of Coney Island, the tiny spit of land at the foot of Brooklyn that, at the turn of the century, became the most extravagant playground in the country and one of the most modern places on earth.

In scale, in variety, in sheer inventiveness, Coney Island was unlike anything anyone had ever seen, and sooner or later, everyone came to see it. "Coney," one man said, "is the most bewilderingly up-to-date place of amusement in the world." On a single day in September 1906, 200,000 postcards were mailed from Coney Island.