In Dreamland nearly everyone ends up at Coney Island. "Coney Island had all these extraordinary rides and exhibits -- the Steeplechase ride, the All Dwarf City, tableaux of all the great disasters of the time. You could see an earthquake in Martinique or the Johnstown Flood. I was really inspired by Ric Burns's great documentary on Coney Island. . . . I saw that Coney Island was a key part of the assimilation process, a sort of blank sheet on which these people projected their greatest hopes and worst fears about life in America. Coney Island was a sort of pageant of their lives." And so is Kevin Baker's Dreamland.
Met History wrote:
In a message dated 6/10/03 11:32:29 AM Eastern Daylight Time, [log in to unmask] writes:
Does anyone know the building that she is trying to save in the movie? (it's supposedly at Coney Island, but no guarantee of fact when in the theater)-Heidi
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Childs in Coney Island, July 21, 2002
Built in 1924, the Childs Restaurant at West 21st Street and the Boardwalk was one of the last gasps of elegance for Coney Island, and its fireproof construction saved part of Coney Island in a massive 1932 blaze. Now a preservation group says it wants to save the building, an effort the family which has owned it for half a century sees not as a offer, but a threat.
By the turn of the century Coney Island was attracting millions, and many of the amusement operators adopted fantastical architectural designs, like Luna Park and Dreamland Park, once at on Surf Avenue between 8th and 11th Streets.
Earlier buildings centered along Surf Avenue - one block in from the beach - but in the early 1920's the arrival of the subway and the construction of the Boardwalk encouraged development outside the center of the amusement area.
In 1924 Childs, the quick lunch chain known for its simple meals, built an imposing, steel-framed restaurant building at 21st and the Boardwalk. Childs was founded in 1889 on Cortlandt Street by Samuel and William Childs, who sought to serve the rushing ferry crowds in downtown New York; by the mid-1920's they were grossing $25 million a year out of over a hundred branches, half in New York City.
William oversaw the operational end and Samuel handled the real estate side. Presumably it was Samuel who oversaw the restaurant's trademark design of the 1910's - storefront establishments which were white-tiled, efficient and clean, responsive to what The New York Times called the American "lust for sanitation".
But for their Coney Island building, the Childs' brought in an elite architectural firm, Ethan Allen Dennison & Fredric C. Hirons - they had both studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The architects embraced the Coney Island esthetic with creative gusto. Against a soft grey stucco field they set a wild profusion of colored terra cotta ornament in varied colors, with a rooftop pergola apparently meant as a dining area.
From a distance, the Childs building presents as a nice but fairly standard neo-Spanish colonial design with classical elements. But, closer, it is clear that the detailing is all "marine to the last degree - and even submarine in part", said the magazine Atlantic Terra Cotta in 1924; Atlantic executed the ornament for the building.
Wherever there was an opportunity for an egg-and-dart or a bracket, the architects put in sea life: seaweed, fish, snails, seahorses, conchs, crabs, shells and scallops, in scarlet gold, green, aqua, blue, white and other colors. This sense of absurd surprise makes the building pleasing beyond its architectural accomplishment.
In 1924 the critic F. S. Laurence, writing in the American Architect, particularly admired the modeling of the marine life, "so lifelike that they might easily have floated in with the tide from Barren Island".
Childs' earlier buildings - usually just storefronts - were objects of derision by architectural writers, and the sudden burst of ambitious design is peculiar. Just after the new Coney Island Childs, the restaurant hired William Van Alen to design a an art deco jewel-box restaurant, much altered but still recognizable at 604 Fifth Avenue, near 48th Street.
Samuel Childs died in early 1925; he missed the Coney Island "Frolics of 1925" in September, a week long carnival with a parade of huge lobsters, frankfurters and glasses of beer, a baby contest with $2000 in prizes, and the presentation of "Miss Coney Island".
After Samuel's death, William Childs took over the company. A dedicated vegetarian - and teetotaler - he gradually removed meat from the company's menus. Earnings dropped from $2 million to $1 million, the stock dropped from 74 in 1925 to 52 ½ in 1928, and he was ousted from the company.
In July 1932 a $5 million blaze swept the Coney Island oceanfront, leaving 1000 homeless, and destroying the bathhouses, rides and homes from 24th Street down to Childs at 21st Street; the restaurant was damaged, but blocked the advance of the flames further east. In the same period, Robert Moses finished a series of parkways connecting Jones Beach to New York - "that's when Coney Island died, when everybody got cars" says Robert V. Ricci, who now owns the old Childs building.
His father Enrico Ricci bought the structure in the 1950's, when "Childs was long gone" says Mr. Ricci. Since then the Ricci family has operated the Tell Chocolate Company from the building. They have kept up the stucco walls, removed the graffiti, kept the building watertight, and cared for the terra cotta. But, with its windows sealed for factory use, the building still has a forlorn air. Noticeable chunks of ornament have been removed, but large sections remain.
Mr. Ricci says that he had 150 people making candy in the 1980's, but now he's down to one employee, and revenues have gone from $2 million year ten years ago to $200,000 in 2001. He has rented out most of the ground floor to a book distributor, and is offering the cavernous main floor for rent. Leftover candy making machinery lines the room, with a 24 foot high ceiling, a terrazzo floor, and more plaques similar to those outside.
But he says that rents are below $5 per square foot in the area - 21st Street is well away from the current amusement area, between 8th Street and 16th Street - not that that section is the high rent district, either. The old Childs is flanked by large, weed-choked vacant lots and backs up onto a social services office.
A year ago, after urging by a preservation group, the Friends of Terra Cotta, the Landmarks Preservation Commission calendared the old Childs for a hearing, although that has not yet taken place.
"It's culturally, historically and architectural significant" says Susan Tunick, founder of the group. "The Riccis have taken great care of it, but every building that's not designated has a possibility of being damaged or lost" she says.Mr. Ricci bristles at the idea that someone else is going to help him take care of the building his family has looked after for half a century, apparently twice as long as the Childs company did. "The Landmarks Commission told me designation is not a big deal. Hey, I have to keep a business together - anything more than saying ‘let's do this now' is a big deal" he says, referring to the review that the Landmarks agency exercises over both interior and exterior changes to Landmark buildings.
"I repaired stuff all over this building, not because anybody asked me, but because I like it" He is also offended by the common preservationist tactic of lobbying for Landmark designation without bringing the owner into the loop. "Susan Tunick went around behind my back for months - where was she when I was paying taxes and repairs for all these years" he says.
Beyond the ring of vacant lots around his building lie ramshackle houses and subsidized housing, although the new KeySpan Park for minor League baseball opened last year at 18th and Surf Avenue.
Mr. Ricci finds ludicrous talk that his building could be converted into a restaurant or nightclub on the fantasy theme of the architecture. "Hey, the stadium's still got empty stores. There's no carnival spirit here, this is a ghetto, it's an inner city" he says.