by Rem Koolhaas
The-Shoot-the-Chutes, the Tunnels of Love, the Submarine, the Creation have all relied on water-based locomotion. The persistence of this mode of travel apparently reflects a deep-seated need of metropolitan inhabitants; the Canals of Venice is its apotheosis, but only provisionally. Dreamland is a laboratory and Reynolds an urbanist: this interior Venice, wrapped in its cocoon of many layers of canvas, is an urban model that will reappear in later incarnations.
The Canals of Venice.
13. Coasting Through Switzerland is a machine designed by Reynolds to correct flaws in Manhattan’s topography and climate. It is the first entirely mechanical resort, a compressed replica of Switzerland.
“Swelterers in Manhattan’s summer sun direct their steps to Dreamland’s…confines, and find relief in a visit to the cooling ice-tipped mountains of ‘Switzerland.’” On the facade of the otherwise hermetic box is “a picture of snowy peaks [that] indicates the pleasure to come” as the visitor mounts “a little Red Sleigh.”
Like Manhattan, this Switzerland is a compound of anxiety and exhilaration. “The first feature to meet the eye is a scene familiar to all who have visited the Alps…. Roped climbers in their dangerous ascent to the mountain have met…with the snapping of a guide-rope and the climbers seem to be falling through space.” But as the little Red Sleigh passes through a valley “teeming with Swiss life,” the impact of the opening drama is “lost in the opening vista of the famous Mt. Blanc.”
Now the sleigh penetrates a tunnel 500 feet long to enter Reynolds’ Alps. “A notable feature is the cooling apparatus which diffuses iced air throughout the whole structure.
“Deftly concealed pipes with openings in the various snowbanks emit the air from the cooling apparatus, while suction ventilators in the roof make a draught that keeps this artificial‘ Switzerland’ as cold and as full of sweet pure air as can be found among the picturesque Swiss mountains.. ”22
Through his manipulations in Switzerland Reynolds fully realizes the potential of technology for the support and production of fantasy, of technology as an instrument and extension of the human imagination. Coney is the laboratory of this Technology of the Fantastic.
14. Where Switzerland shows Reynolds taming technology, Fighting the Flames constitutes his most convincing exposition of and commentary on the metropolitan condition itself.
It is a building without a roof, 250 feet long, 100 feet deep. Each column on the facade is surmounted by a figure of a fireman; the roofline is an intricate motif of fire hoses, helmets and axes.
Bird’s-eye view of Coney Island at night, with regulated Apocalypse of Fighting the Flames: the dark side of Metropolis—an astronomical increase in the potential for disaster only just exceeded by an equally astronomical increase in the ability to avert it.”
The classical exterior gives no indication of the drama inside, where “in the vast expanse of ground a square of a city has been built, showing houses and streets with a hotel in the foreground.” Four thousand firemen inhabit, permanently, this metropolitan “set”; they are “recruits from the fire departments of this and nearby, cities [who] know their business thoroughly.” Waiting in the wings of the synthetic block is a flotilla of disaster prevention: The fire apparatus will include four engines and hose wagons, an extension ladder truck, a water tower, an ambulance and a battalion chief’s wagon.”
But the main protagonist on the urban stage is the city block itself: Fighting the Flames introduces the block as actor. “An alarm rings; the men will leap from their beds and slide down the brass poles…. The hotel in the foreground is on fire and there are people inside it. The flames, discovered on the first floor of the hotel, cut off their escape. People throng the square, shouting and gesticulating; the engines arrive, then the water tower, hose wagons, extension ladder truck, the battalion chief and”—once more establishing the connection between rescue and loss—“an ambulance, which runs over a man in its race of relief.
“The flames creep up to the next story…. The inmates at the windows are driven from story to story by fire and smoke.
“When they reach the top floor an explosion is heard, and the roof of the building falls in….” 23
Yet the hysterical guests are saved, the fire put out and the city block prepared for its next performance.
The entire spectacle defines the dark side of Metropolis as an astronomical increase in the potential for disaster only just exceeded by an equally astronomical increase in the ability to avert it. Manhattan is the outcome of that perpetual neck-and-neck race.
15.The Japanese Teahouse is converted, after one year and minimal modification, into the Airship Building. Inside a two-story Japanese temple is displayed, from 1905, the Santos Dumont Airship No. 9. “A cigar-shaped balloon…60 feet long of oilskin from which is, suspended a framework 35 feet long. A three-horse-power gasoline motor operates a two-blade propeller …”24
Santos Dumont Airship No. 9.
Earlier in 1905 Santos Dumont has performed maneuvers with this vehicle for the French president and war department; only months later Reynolds is in a position to schedule “a daily flight over Coney Island.” To substantiate Dreamland’s claims as an autonomous state—with its own intelligentsia—he introduces the aeronaut-inventor Santos Dumont—now his employee—as the “noted Brazilian Scientist”; the small aircraft does, in fact, perform scientific experiments from its base in the backyard of the Japanese temple.
Simultaneously with this daily flight over Coney, Dreamland still accommodates, in apparent conflict, the hourly simulated flight over Manhattan.
Reality now supersedes dream, reinforcing the suggestion implicit in Dreamland that the Future is gaining on fantasy, and that Dreamland will be the territory where the actual overtaking occurs.
16. The Leap Frog Railway is a special pier with a track leading nowhere, on which Reynolds stages the impossible: two bulletlike trains move toward each other at full speed on the same track, to meet an absurdist challenge once posed by Mark Twain as the only thing that Yankee Ingenuity had not yet accomplished…the successful passing of two carloads on a single line of tracks.”
The Leap Frog cars rely on a technical invention that mimics animal copulation. They carry a pair of bent rails on their backs that allow them to glide over and under each other (On the return trip the cars change position.)
Leap Frog Railway—exhilarating accident witnessed from parallel track.
The passengers in breathless excitement momentarily anticipating disaster, realizing that their lives are in jeopardy, clinging to one another for safety, closing their eyes to the impending danger….
The cars crash into one another 32 people are hurled over the heads of 32 others…. They are suddenly awakened, to a realization of the fact that they have actually collided with another car and yet they find themselves safe and sound…proceeding in the same direction in which they started….”25
Ostensibly the Leap Frog Railway is a prototype to reduce the mortality rate due to collisions on railways,” but in this apotheosis of the tradition of barely averted disaster Reynolds has blended the mechanics of sex with the imminence of death in a single respectable experience.
17. The Beacon Tower, smallest in plan, is perhaps Dreamland’s most important structure.
It “rises 375 feet above a spacious park and is the dominating note around which the general scheme is centered…. The most striking and conspicuous structure for miles around…When illuminated by over 100,000 electric lights it can be seen for a distance of over 30 miles. The Tower contains two elevators and from the top is obtained a magnificent sea view…and a bird’s-eye view of the Island.”26
Beacon Tower at night.
For a year it leads a relatively bland existence as the finest Tower ever built.” Then Reynolds makes it the definitive instrument in the systematic short-circuiting of the
external world that is Dreamland’s true mission.
He equips it with the most powerful searchlight on the eastern seaboard. The US Department of Lighthouses is forced to “crack down on the park in 1906…. Didn’t the park realize that the alternating red and white beam was identical with that of the Norton’s Point light”27—which marks the official entrance to New York’s harbor? This surreal competition with reality is Reynolds’ masterstroke: the searchlight is to lure ships off course, add real wrecks to the inventory of Dreamland’s disasters, confuse and discredit the world outside Dreamland’s borders. (Twenty-five years later Reynolds, as the developer of the Chrysler Building, will insist on its silver crown over the objections of his architect.)
(Senator Reynolds would later promote the Chrysler Building.)
SHORTAGE
Dreamland opens only seven years after Steeplechase. Ostensibly seeking to provide unlimited entertainment and pleasure, Tilyou, Thompson and Reynolds have in fact alienated a part of the earth’s surface further from nature than architecture has ever succeeded in doing before, and turned it into a magic carpet that can: reproduce experience and fabricate almost any sensation; sustain any number of ritualistic performances that exorcise the apocalyptic penalties of the metropolitan condition (announced in the Bible and deeply ingrained since in the antiurban American sensibility); and survive the onslaught of over a million visitors a day.
In less than a decade they have invented and established an urbanism based on the new Technology of the Fantastic: a permanent conspiracy against the realities of the external world. It defines completely new relationships between site, program, form and technology. The site has now become a miniature state; the program its ideology; and architecture the arrangement of the technological apparatus that compensates for the loss of real physicality.
The frenzied pace with which this psycho-mechanical urbanism has extended its tentacles across Coney Island testifies to the existence of a vacuum that had to be filled at all costs.
Just as a given meadow can only support a certain number of cows without being grazed bald, the reality of nature is progressively consumed under the simultaneous escalation of culture and density in the same spot.
The Metropolis leads to Reality Shortage; Coney’s multiple synthetic realities offer a replacement.
OUTPOSTS
Coney’s new urbanism of Fantastic Technology generates spin-offs all across the United States, even on sites that do not nearly approach an urban density. Outposts of Manhattanism, they serve as advertisements for the metropolitan condition itself.
Steeplechase, Luna and Dreamland are reproduced faithfully: Roller Coaster, Collapsing Alphabet and Fighting the Flames are transplanted to the middle of nowhere. Smoke and flames can be seen for miles on otherwise innocent horizons.
Their effect is stunning: rural Americans who have never been to cities visit the parks. The first high-rise building they ever see is a burning block, their first sculpture is an alphabet about to collapse.
Bird’s-eye view of Coney Island’s middle zone, c. 1906—a Metropolis of the Irrational: Steeplechase (far left), Luna Park (rear center, north of Surf Avenue), Dreamland (front right). The incipient Urbanism of the Fantastic was extremely unstable—facilities were modified and replaced continuously to respond to new demands and latest technological developments; all curves are competing roller coasters.
REVOLUTION
Now that the masses have solved the problem of Pleasure, they present the elite elsewhere on the island with the problem of the Masses. Between the comparatively salubrious islands of Steeplechase and Luna Park is an ever-deteriorating community. “There is scarcely any variety of human flotsam and jetsam that is not represented in its permanent population…. Every defaulting cashier, every eloping couple, every man or woman harboring suicidal intent…comes flocking to it from every part of the land” to be exposed to “a concentrated sublimation of all the mean, petty, degrading swindles which depraved ingenuity has ever devised to prey upon humanity…28
The beach itself has become a last resort for the most hopeless victims of metropolitan life, who buy tickets to Coney with their last few cents and huddle together with the wreckage of their families to wait for the end…staring out over the impassive ocean to the sound of waves crashing on the sand.
“What a sight the poor make in the moonlight,”29 whispers with an aesthetic shiver the chronicler of the mutant lifestyle of the Metropolis, faced with this terminal front line; each morning Coney’s police collect the corpses.
But however outrageous, the situation of the wretched poor is not the real threat to the peace of mind of the reformers now isolated on the east end of the island, forced to retreat inside the still-civilized bastions of the resort hotels by the proliferation of the middle zone.
The gay battlefield of the Reality Shortage, the entertainment generated in Steeplechase, Luna and Dreamland, inspires loathing. Machines going through the motions of the Tango, a lighthouse that lures innocent ships, the masses racing on steel tracks in the moonlight, electric, phantom cities more beautiful than anything seen before on earth, all seem to announce the imminent usurpation of a civilization that has taken thousands of years to mature.
They are the symptoms of revolution.
The east panics and becomes the headquarters of a belated campaign to rescue the rest of the island, a last-ditch effort at preservation that intensifies in direct proportion to the success of the Parks.
The issues, tactics and proposed solutions anticipate—in naked form—the tortured misunderstandings between official and popular culture, between elitist taste and popular imagination, that are to agonize the coming century. The debate is a dress rehearsal of the arguments respectable culture will mobilize to denigrate its probable replacement: the potentially sublime is criticized for being cheap and unreal.
Plan of Coney Island’s middle zone, 1907: Steeplechase (lower left), Luna Park (upper right) and Dreamland (lower right). Each rectangle represents a different pleasure-generating unit; entire system of mass irrationality is structured by island’s grid.
Metropolitan outposts in the provinces: Park with Burning Block on Lake Ontario.
FIASCO
In 1906, two years after the opening of Luna, Maxim Gorky visits the USA as a Socialist reporter.
His visit is a fiasco, especially after Manhattan’s newspapers organize a mass protest in front of the Times Square Hotel where Gorky, “the Bitter One,” is staying. To cheer him up, friends take the Russian to Coney Island. In the essay “Boredom,” he articulates his horrified reactions to Coney and its freak culture.
“The City, magic and fantastic from afar, now appears an absurd jungle of straight lines of wood, a cheap, hastily constructed toyhouse for the amusement of children.
“Dozens of white buildings, monstrously diverse, not one with even the suggestion of beauty. They are built of wood, and smeared over with peeling white paint which gives them the appearance of suffering from the same skin disease….
“Everything is stripped naked by the dispassionate glare. The glare is everywhere, and nowhere a shadow…. The visitor is stunned; his consciousness is withered by the intense gleam; his thoughts are routed from his mind; he becomes a particle in the crowd….”
Gorky’s disgust represents the modern intellectual’s dilemma: confronted with the masses, whom he admires theoretically, in the flesh, he suffers from an acute distaste. He cannot admit to this disgust; he sublimates it by identifying external exploitation and corruption as the reason for the masses’ aberrations.
Metropolitan densities arrive at Coney Island.
“The people huddled together in this City actually number hundreds of thousands. They swarm into the cages like black flies. Children walk about, silent, with gaping mouths and dazzled eyes. They look around with such intensity, such seriousness that the s
ight of them feeding their little souls upon this hideousness, which they mistake for beauty, inspires a pained sense of pity….
“They are filled with contented ennui, their nerves are racked by an intricate maze of motion and dazzling fire. Bright eyes grow still brighter, as if the brain pales and lost blood in the strange turmoil of the white, glittering wood. The ennui, which issues from under the pressure of self-disgust, seems to turn into a slow circle of agony. It drags tens of thousands of people into its somber dance, and sweeps them into a will-less heap, as the wind sweeps the rubbish of the streets….”30
INDICTMENT
Gorky’s indictment of Fantastic Technology and of the middle zone’s arsenal against the Reality Shortage as essentially mediocre and fraudulent is only the most sophisticated display of the compound of prejudice and contempt that feeds the hotel zone’s phobias. This fundamental misjudgment and a subsequent series of similar misreadings guarantees the taste-making establishment’s early disqualification for further participation in the experiment Manhattan.
Their sensibilities offended by the “peeling white paint,” pitying the manipulated masses, disparaging the events in the middle zone as compared to their own unreal well-preserved Arcadia, they look behind Coney’s facade and therefore see nothing.
Based on a false analysis, their solution is doomed to be irrelevant: in the public interest, the island is to be turned into a park.
In what will become a standard remedy against the spontaneous urbanism of the masses—exorcism of the demon of mass irrationality—they propose to raze the City of Towers, to root out every, trace of the infamous infrastructure as if it were a poisonous weed and to restore the surface of the earth to its “natural” state, a thin layer of grass.