Laura Numeroff is an author and illustrator of best-selling children's books who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 60s. She shares memories of being taken to Steeplechase Park by her father, who worked for the World Telegram and got press passes...
Content type: Oral History Item
"Coney Island made me who I am," says film director and screenwriter Stefon Bristol, who grew up in the 1990s on West 27th Street. His family moved from East Flatbush to Coney after buying one of the new townhouses built by Astella Development. He...
Content type: Oral History Item
An interview with Dr. Roland Summit, author, historian, expert on carousels and carousel horse carvers, and founding member of the National Carousel Association. Beginning in 1959, Roland and his wife Jo collected, restored, and preserved hundreds...
Content type: Oral History Item
Janet Rubino tells her story about being one of Dr. Martin Couney's incubator babies on display in Coney Island. Rubino, who weighed 23 ounces at birth, also describes a visit to the incubator exhibit when she was a child.
Content type: Oral History Item
Stanley Shapiro and his family lived at 2841 West 20th Street in Coney Island when he was a boy in the 1940s. "My heart is in Coney Island," says Shapiro, who goes back four times a year to walk the length of the Boardwalk and have a Nathan's hot...
Content type: Oral History Item
Zohra Saed is a poet, editor and translator who was born in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and immigrated to Brooklyn with her family as a child in the 1980s. She grew up in the close-knit Uzbek-Turkestani community on Ocean Avenue in Sheepshead Bay and...
Content type: Oral History Item
Tony Williams and his family moved from Harlem to Coney Island when he was 13. He lived on West 33rd Street between Mermaid and Neptune Avenues from 1966 until the late 1970s. Tall for his age (he was 6'2"), Tony was hired to operate rides in the...
Content type: Oral History Item
This interview was conducted and recorded in Russian. Read Julia Kanin's transcript and translation below. Интервью проведено и записано на русском языке. Вы можете ознакомиться с траснскриптом и переводом Юлии Ханиной ниже.
Ellina Graypel is a...
Content type: Oral History Item
Cuzzo Sosay is a musician and producer of gangster hip hop, soul music, inspirational music, and R & B who visited the Coney Island History Project this past summer. As a boy growing up in Brooklyn in the 1980s, his parents took him to Coney...
Content type: Oral History Item
Filmmaker Joyce Chopra grew up in Coney Island and Sea Gate in the 1930s and ‘40s. Her grandparents were the owners of Kalina's Baths on Surf Avenue at West 33rd Street. Chopra describes how she got the acting bug at Lincoln High School while...
Content type: Oral History Item