Coney Island

Coney Island is the story of a tiny spit of land at the foot of Brooklyn that at the turn of the century became the most extravagant playground in the country. In scale, in variety, in sheer inventiveness, Coney Island was unlike anything anyone had ever seen, and sooner or later everyone came to see it. "Coney," one man said in 1904, "is the most bewilderingly up-to-date place of amusement in the world." Coney Island is a lively and absorbing portrait of the extraordinary amusement empire that astonished, delighted and shocked the nation -- and took Americans from the Victorian age into the modern world.