A wooden roller coaster from 1927 that is a designated landmark and still runs, a boardwalk, a free beach and the hot dog contest. Forty minutes on the subway.
What is left of it
Coney Island in 1900 had three competing amusement parks — Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland — electric light on a scale nobody had seen, and a million visitors on a hot Sunday. Dreamland burned in 1911, Luna Park burned in 1944, Steeplechase closed in 1964, and Robert Moses spent decades trying to turn the whole peninsula into housing.
What survived is a working seaside amusement district with the two rides that matter, a boardwalk, a beach, and a neighbourhood that has been reinvented several times.
The two landmarks
The Cyclone, 1927, wooden, 85 feet, and a New York City landmark that you are allowed to ride. It is rough — genuinely rough, in a way modern coasters are engineered not to be — and it lasts under two minutes. Charles Lindbergh reportedly said it was scarier than flying. Sit at the back if you want the worst of it.
The Wonder Wheel, 1920, is a 150-foot Ferris wheel with sixteen swinging cars that slide on rails toward the centre as it turns, and eight stationary ones. It has never had an accident and it has run continuously except during the war. Take a swinging car.
Luna Park around them is a modern operator with a mix of new rides, and the Thunderbolt is a fast steel coaster from 2014.
The boardwalk
The Riegelmann Boardwalk runs 2.7 miles from Sea Gate to Brighton Beach. The beach below it is free, public, sandy, lifeguarded in season, and genuinely used — it is the beach for a very large part of Brooklyn.
Nathan’s Famous at Surf and Stillwell has been there since 1916 and hosts the hot dog eating contest every 4th of July, which is televised and attended by tens of thousands of people, which says something about somewhere.
The New York Aquarium is on the boardwalk and is good, particularly since the shark building opened.
The Cyclones, a minor league baseball team, play at Maimonides Park with the wheel visible over the outfield. A ticket costs very little and it is one of the better cheap evenings in New York.
Brighton Beach
Walk east along the boardwalk for fifteen minutes and Coney Island becomes Brighton Beach, which has been the centre of Russian and Ukrainian New York since the 1970s and is often called Little Odessa. The shops under the elevated train on Brighton Beach Avenue sell smoked fish, pelmeni and a great deal of caviar, and the restaurants do long, loud, extremely large dinners.
It is a completely different experience from the amusement park and it is a fifteen-minute walk.
More Other Places
The Oculus
A four-billion-dollar train station shaped like a bird leaving a hand, which is either the most beautiful transit hall in America or the most expensive shopping mall. Free.
Green-Wood Cemetery
478 acres of Victorian garden cemetery that was the second most visited attraction in America after Niagara Falls in the 1860s. Free, and a flock of green parakeets lives on the gate.
Bronx Zoo
265 acres, around 6,000 animals, and the zoo that led the shift from cages to habitats. Pay what you wish on Wednesdays.