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SUMMER AMUSEMENT PARKS 304 They laugh at themselves with perfect charity—and come again. But the one great secret which the caterer in public amusement has learned and must learn well is that mankind never loses the heritage of its great mystery—the mystery of childhood. Popular Responses Coney Island was one of the few avenues of temporary escape available for the urban poor. Of all the large cities, New York had the highest proportion of recent immigrants; by the 1880s, four-fifths of the population were first-and second-generation Americans. East European Jews were the most numerous of the newcomers in the thirty years before World War One. In Anzia Yezierska ’s novel Bread Givers (1925), Sara Smolinsky is embarrassed when the women in the Lower East Side laundry tell ribald stories of unseemly behavior at Coney Island. In 1902, Sadie Frowne, a sixteen-year-old, orphaned Jewish immigrant from Poland, told her story to a weekly magazine interested in the lives of the ‘‘undistinguished.’’ Industrial workers labored for long hours, about sixty a week, rather less for those in retail and the service trades, but generally had Saturday afternoons free. Frowne saw Coney’s dance halls, like the melodramatic theater, as welcome relief from the tiring, foot-operated sewing machines in the Brooklyn garment sweatshop, relief that was just an hour’s journey away. The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves, ed. Hamilton Holt (1906; New York: Routledge, 1990), 21, 86–87; originally published in the Independent 54 (September 25, 1902): 2279–82; 55 (September 24, 1903): 2261–66. Sometimes we go to Coney Island, where there are good dancing places, and sometimes we go to Ulmer Park for picnics. I am very fond of dancing, and, in fact, all sorts of pleasure. . . . But a girl must have clothes if she is to go into high society at Ulmer Park or Coney Island or the theatre. Those who blame me are the old country people who have old-fashioned notions, but the people who have been here a long time know better. A girl who does not dress well is stuck in a corner, even if she is pretty, and Aunt Fanny says that I do just right to put on plenty of style. In 1903, Agnes M., a twenty-year-old immigrant from Alsace-Lorraine, also told of her delight in enjoying social freedom as a single woman. As a nursemaid, she received twenty-five dollars a month, with additional food and clothing. She spent her two free afternoons a week in outings with Germanspeaking friends to local beaches, and in dancing. I like Coney Island best of all. It is a wonderful and beautiful place. I took a German friend, a girl who had just come out, down there last week, and when we had been on Popular Responses 305 the razzle-dazzle, the chute and the loop-the-loop, and down in the coal mine and all over the Bowery, and up in the tower and everywhere else, I asked her how she liked it. She said: ‘‘Ach, it is just like what I see when I dream of heaven.’’ Yet I have heard some of the high people with whom I have been living say that Coney Island is not tony [high-toned]. The trouble is these high people don’t know how to dance. I have to laugh when I see them at their balls and parties. If only I could get out on the floor and show them how—they would be astonished. Coney Island was a strange amalgam of order and disorder, the pretentious and the squalid. In 1905, in a snobbish guide to slumming celebrating the flâneur (the sophisticated observer who strolled through the city), Richard Hughes applauded the recent architectural glories but warned that Bowery ‘‘plebeiance at its worst’’ still lingered on the margins. Clustered haphazardly around the three walled parks remained scores of amusement enterprises. Roller coasters, switchback railways, and re-enacted narrative spectaculars, ranging from the classical Fall of Pompeii to the heroic Rough Riders, still mingled with fast-food counters, restaurants, beer halls, boxing booths, vaudeville shows, and cheap nickelodeons with the latest movies. Dance halls were especially popular with the young. The opening of Dreamland in 1904 provided O. Henry with a suitable setting to explore ‘‘New Coney’’ and IrishAmerican working-class subculture. Southern-born Henry (William S. Porter ) was a prolific short-story writer with a close interest in...

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