Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
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But the need for pleasure dominates; the middle zone develops its own magnetism, attracting a range of special facilities to provide entertainment on a scale commensurate with the demand of the masses.
In a laughing mirror-image of the seriousness with which the rest of the world is obsessed with Progress, Coney Island attacks the problem of Pleasure, often with the same technological means.
TOWER
The campaign to step up the production of pleasure generates its own instruments.
In 1876 a 300-foot tower—centerpiece of the Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia— is dismantled in anticipation of re-erection elsewhere. Sites all over the States are considered and rejected; suddenly, after two years of disassembly, it stands reassembled in the middle zone of Coney. From its top the whole island is visible and telescopes can be focused on Manhattan. Like the Latting Observatory, the Centennial Tower is an architectural device that provokes self-consciousness, offering that bird’s-eye inspection of a common domain that can trigger a sudden spurt of collective energy and ambition.
It also offers an additional direction of escape: mass ascension.
FLOTSAM
The journey of the vagrant tower from Philadelphia to Coney Island establishes a precedent for the subsequent journeys to Coney of other remnants of Exhibitions and World’s Fairs.
The island becomes the final resting place of futuristic fragments, mechanical flotsam and technological litter whose migration across the United States toward Coney coincides with the trek of tribes from Africa, Asia and Micronesia to the same destination. They too have been on display at the fairs, as a new form of educational entertainment.
This totemic machinery, a small army of midgets and other freaks who retire to Coney after a life of hectic traveling, some residual Red Indians who have nowhere else to go and the foreign tribes constitute the permanent population of this narrow beach.
BRIDGE
In 1883 the Brooklyn Bridge removes the last obstacle that has kept the new masses on Manhattan: on summer Sundays Coney Island’s beach becomes the most densely occupied place in the world.
This invasion finally invalidates whatever remains of the original formula for Coney Island’s performance as a resort, the provision of Nature to the citizens of the Artificial.
To survive as a resort—a place offering contrast—Coney Island is forced to mutate: it must turn itself into the total opposite of Nature, it has no choice but to counteract the artificiality of the new metropolis with its own Super-Natural.
Instead of suspension of urban pressure, it offers intensification.
TRAJECTORY
The reconstituted Centennial Tower is the first manifestation of an obsession that will eventually turn the entire island into a launching pad of the proletariat.
In 1883 the antigravitational theme it has initiated is elaborated in the Loop-the-Loop, a railroad that loops around itself so that a small vehicle will cling to an upside-down surface, provided it travels at a certain speed. As a piece of research, it is costly; it claims several lives each season. Only four customers at a time can experience the momentary weightlessness it affords, and only a limited number of vehicles can complete the inverted trajectory in an hour. These constraints alone doom the Loop-the-Loop as an instrument of mass exhilaration. Its offspring is the Roller Coaster, patented and built the very next season, 1884: its track parodies the curves, hills and valleys of a regular railway trajectory. Whole trainloads of people tear up and down its slope with such violence that they undergo the magic sensation of liftoff at the peaks; it easily supplants the Loop-the-Loop. The wriggly tracks multiply on their shaky supports, within a few seasons turning the entire middle zone into a vibrating mountain range of steel.
In 1895 Captain Boyton, a professional diver and pioneer of under water living, introduces a crypto-Freudian complication into the battle against gravity with his Shoot-the-Chutes, a toboggan hoisted mechanically to the top of a tower from which a diagonal slide descends toward a body of water. Anxiety as to whether the board will stay on top of the water or slip under the surface provides the suspense as the rider slides downward.
A steady flow of visitors climbs the tower for the descent toward the muddy water, which is otherwise inhabited by 40 sea lions. By 1890 “the thing that is furthest from reason, that laughs loudest at the laws of gravitation, is the thing that takes with the Coney Island crowd….”4
Even before the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, one venture has indicated the future direction of the island’s pursuit of irrational ends by entirely rational means: the first “natural” element to be conquered and appropriated in the quest for the New Pleasure is an elephant “as big as a church” that is also a hotel.
“Its legs were 60 feet in circumference. In one front leg was a cigar store, in the other a diorama; patrons walked up circular steps in one hind leg and down the other.”5
Rooms can be had in thigh, shoulder, hip or trunk. Searchlights flash erratically from its eyes, illuminating anyone within range who has decided to spend the night on the beach.
A second annexation of nature is achieved with the creation of the Inexhaustible Cow, a machine constructed to satisfy the insatiable thirst of the visitors, then disguised as a cow.
Its milk is superior to the natural product in the regularity and predictability of its flow, its hygienic quality and its controllable temperature.
Metropolitan shift-systems (1): Electric Bathing—the Synthetic becomes Irresistible.
ELECTRICITY
Similar adaptations follow at a constantly accelerating rate.
The inordinate number of people assembling on the inadequate acreage, ostensibly seeking confrontation with the reality of the elements (sun, wind, sand, water) demands the systematic conversion of nature into a technical service.
Since the total surface area of the beach and the total length of surf line are finite, it follows with mathematical certainty that the hundreds of thousands of visitors will not each find a place to spread out on the sand, let alone reach the water, within a single day.
Toward 1890, the introduction of electricity makes it possible to, create a second daytime. Bright lights are placed at regular intervals along the surf line, so that now the sea can be enjoyed on a truly metropolitan shift-system, giving those unable to reach the water in the daytime a man-made, 12-hour extension.
What is unique in Coney Island—and this syndrome of the Irresistible Synthetic prefigures later events in Manhattan - is that this false daytime is not regarded as second-rate.
Its very artificiality becomes an attraction: “Electric Bathing.”
Barrels of Love—anti-alienation apparatus.
CYLINDERS
Even the most intimate aspects of human nature are subjected to experiment. If life in the metropolis creates loneliness and alienation, Coney Island counterattacks with the Barrels of Love. Two horizontal cylinders mounted in line—revolve slowly in opposite directions. At either end a small staircase leads up to an entrance.
One feeds men into the machine, the other women.
It is impossible to remain standing.
Men and women fall on top of each other.
The unrelenting rotation of the machine fabricates synthetic intimacy between people who would never otherwise have met.
This intimacy can be further processed in the Tunnels of Love, an artificial mountain constructed next to the Barrels of Love. Outside the mountain the newly formed couples board a small boat that disappears inside a dark tunnel leading to an interior lake. Inside the tunnel complete obscurity ensures at least visual privacy; from the muffled noises it is impossible to guess how many couples are crossing the lake at any one time. The rocking of the small boats on the shallow water reinforces the sensuality of the experience.
Metropolitan shift-systems (2): Steeplechase horsemen riding through th
e night.
HORSES
The favorite activity of the cosmopolites who enjoyed the island in its virgin state was horseback riding. But the ability to ride a horse is a form of sophistication not available to the people who have replaced the original visitors. And real horses can never coexist in adequate numbers on the same island with the new visitors.
In the mid-nineties George Tilyou—son of Peter Tilyou, the Surf House pioneer—lays out a mechanized track that extends over a large part of the island, a course that leads through a number of natural landscapes, along the oceanfront, and crosses a series of man-made obstacles.
Over this track moves a herd of mechanical horses that can be ridden with instant confidence by anyone. The Steeplechase is an “automatic racetrack with gravitation as its motive power”; its “horses resemble in size and model the track racer. Staunchly built, they are to a certain extent under the control of the rider, who can accelerate the speed by the manner in which he utilizes his weight and the position, on the descending and ascending grades, making each contest an actual race.”6
The horses operate 24 hours a day and are an unprecedented success. Financial investment in the track is recouped after three weeks of operation. Inspired by the Midway Plaisance, which connected the two halves of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, Tilyou collects additional facilities—including a Ferris wheel from the same fair—along and around the mechanical course, gradually staking out a discrete amusement area that is formalized when in 1897 he erects a wall around it and channels his visitors through entrances marked by triumphal arches of plaster accumulations of the iconography of laughter—clowns, pierrots, masks. With the act of enclosure, Tilyou has established an aggressive opposition between what he names Steeplechase Park and the rest of the island.
FORMULA
Coney Island’s reputation has plummeted even as its popularity has risen. The formula of innocent pleasures inside versus corruption outside—implied by Tilyou’s enclave—is a first step toward possible rehabilitation. Such a compact oasis can be the planning module for a gradual reclamation of the island’s otherwise lost territory. It would clearly be counterproductive for the various intramural facilities to compete by offering identical, or incompatible pleasures. A process originates within the walls that generates a spectrum of coordinated facilities. The concept of the park is the architectural equivalent of an empty canvas. Tilyou’s wall defines a territory that can—theoretically—be shaped and controlled by a single individual and is thereby invested with a thematic potential; but he, fails to exploit fully his breakthrough. He limits his activities to extending the tracks, perfecting the realism of his horses and adding such obstacles as the “water jump,” inventing only one more device to alienate further his park from the reality of the island: his entrances now lead directly to the Earthquake floor, where the natural skin of the earth is replaced by a hidden mechanical graft that shakes. The randomness and violence of the tremors demand surrender. To earn the right to enter Steeplechase, the visitor must participate in an involuntary ballet.
Exhausted by his inventions, Tilyou writes poetry and captures in a moment of lucid euphoria the significance of what he has helped create: “If Paris is France, Coney Island, between June and September, is the World.”7
ASTRONAUTS
In 1903, the year the new Williamsburg Bridge injects even more visitors into Coney Island’s already overtaxed system, Frederic Thompson and Elmer Dundy open a second park—Luna.
Dundy is a financial genius and an entertainment professional; he has experience with fairs, attractions and concessions. Thompson is Coney’s first important outsider: he has no previous experience with any form of amusement. At 26, he has dropped out of architectural school, frustrated by the irrelevance of the Beaux-Arts system to the new age.
He is the first professional designer active on the island.
Borrowing Tilyou’s park-enclave model, Thompson invests it with systematic intellectual rigor and a degree of deliberation that puts its planning once and for all on a conscious and architectural basis. Steeplechase isolated itself from its surrounding mess on the most literal level: with a wall.
Thompson doubles the isolation of Luna Park by imposing a theme that embraces the entire site in a system of, metaphorical meaning: its surface is to be “not of this earth” but part of the Moon. On entering, Luna Park’s masses are turned into astronauts in a conceptual airlock through which they all have to pass:
“The Trip to the Moon on the airship Luna IV…Once on board of the great airship, her huge wings rise and fall, the trip is really begun and the ship is soon 100 feet in the air. A wonderful, widespread panorama of the surrounding sea, Manhattan and Long Island seems to be receding as the ship mounts upward.
“Houses recede from view until the earth fades from sight, while the Moon grows larger and larger. Passing over the Lunar satellite the barren and desolate nature of its surface is seen.
“The airship gently settles, the landing made, and the passengers enter the cool caverns of the Moon… .”8
In one gesture, the whole structure of mutually reinforcing realities on earth—its laws, expectations, inhibitions—is suspended to create a moral weightlessness that complements the literal weightlessness that has been generated on the trip to the Moon.
Luna Park by day and by night.
THEORY
The center of Luna Park is a large lake, an echo of the lagoon at the Chicago Fair. At one end of it stands the Shoot-the-Chutes; in this formal position it more strongly invites descent into the regions of collective unconscious.
The lake is lined by a forest of needlelike structures, specimens of Moon architecture. Thompson’s own comments indicate the acuteness of his private rebellion against Beaux-Arts repression.
Traced by a reporter “in the midst of this planetary upheaval …the arch-plotter of this embryonic paradise…[was] seated over an extinct volcano of his own making and conjuring airy shapes out of the formless void around him.”
For Thompson, Luna Park is a manifesto:
You see, I have built Luna Park on a definite architectural plan. As it is a place of amusement, I have eliminated all classical conventional forms from its structure and taken a sort of free renaissance and Oriental type for my model, using spires and minarets wherever I could, in order to get the restive, joyous effect to be derived always from the graceful lines given in this style of architecture.
“It is marvelous what you can do in the way of arousing human emotions by the use you can make architecturally, of simple lines. Luna Park is built on that theory—and the result has proven that theory’s worth.”
This is 1903.
Thompson’s pride is Luna’s skyline, “an ensemble of snow-white pinnacles and towers limned against the blue firmament [that] is wonderfully pleasing to thousands of eyes heartily tired of the brick, mortar and stone of the Great City.”
Before Thompson, single towers have often acted at fairs as lone climaxes of elaborate Beaux-Arts complexes, exclamation marks within carefully coordinated overall designs, deriving their dignity and impact from their singleness.
Thompson’s genius is to let these needles proliferate at random, to create an architectural spectacle out of the drama of their frenzied scramble for individuality and to identify this battle of the spires as the definitive sign of otherworldliness, the mark of another, condition.
This forest of towers, instead of Coney’s virgin nature, now provides an antidote to the grimness of the city.
Season after season Thompson adds towers to his park. After three years he boasts: “Then, for our skyline we have just 1,221 towers, minarets and domes—a great increase over what we had last year.” The growth of this architectural plantation becomes the compulsive measure of Luna’s vitality: “You see, this being the Moon, it is always changing.
“A stationary Luna Park would be an anomaly.�
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Even if on the Moon, Thompson has created the first City of Towers: functionless, except to overstimulate the imagination and keep any recognizable earthly realities at a distance. Now he uses electricity—the essential ingredient of the new paraphernalia of illusion as an architectural duplicator.
In broad daylight Luna’s small towers have a pathetic, dimension, an aura of cheapness, but by superimposing over its skyline a network of wires and light bulbs, Thompson describes a second, illusory skyline, even more impressive than the first, a separate city of night.
“In the wilderness of the sky and ocean rises the magic picture of a flaming city,” and “with the advent of night a fantastic city all of fire suddenly rises from the ocean into the sky…. Fabulous beyond conceiving, ineffably beautiful, is this fiery scintillation.”
For the price of one, Thompson has created two distinct cities, each with its own character, its own life, its own inhabitants. Now the city itself is to be lived in shifts; the electric city, phantom offspring of the “real” city, is an even more powerful instrument for the fulfillment of fantasy.
INFRASTRUCTURE
To perform this miracle in three years, Thompson has compacted on the 38 acres of his park an infrastructure that makes it square inch for square inch the most modern fragment of the world. Luna’s infrastructure and communications network are more complex, elaborate, sophisticated and energy-consuming than those of most contemporary American cities.
“A few brief facts and figures will give an idea of the immensity of Luna. 1,700 persons are employed during the summer season. It has its own telegraph office, cable office, wireless office and local and long distance telephone service. 1,300,000 electric lights are used for illumination. Throughout its acreage…are suitable accommodations for 500 head of animals…. The Towers, spires and minarets number 1,326 [1907]…. The admissions at the front gates since the opening of Old Luna Park have totalled over 60,000,000….”10