"Growing Up in the 1970s," the new episode of Coney Island Stories, has dropped. Listen and subscribe via your podcast app or the podcast page on our website.

Season Two’s theme is “Growing Up in Coney Island” through the decades, from the 1930s to the 21st century. In Episode Five, Coney Islanders who grew up in the 1970s share memories of being the original tenants of Carey Gardens and O’Dwyer Gardens, newly built high-rise developments overseen by the New York City Housing Authority. They remember the razing of entire blocks in the West End during urban renewal, pervasive crime affecting their lives, and gangs like the Homicides and the Seven Immortals inspiring the movie The Warriors. By mid-decade, New York City went broke and abandoned Coney Island. The one bright spot in the 1970s was Astroland amusement park’s two million dollar investment in new rides, including the Enterprise, named after the USS Enterprise in the TV series Star Trek, and sponsorship of air shows with the Army Golden Knights and the Air Force Thunderbirds.

The oral histories in Episode Five are with Karen Dawn Blondel, Mindy Gress, Orlando Mendez, Gene Ritter, Keith Suber, and Eliot Wofse. The interviews were conducted by Charles Denson, Amanda Deutch, Katya Kumkova, Mark Markov, and Tricia Vita between 2016 and 2022. This episode was produced by Charles Denson, Ali Lemer and Tricia Vita. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

This program is sponsored in part by an Action Grant from Humanities New York with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Among the recent additions to the Coney Island History Project's oral history archive are interviews with Carlos Quinones, a longtime resident of Coney Island who drove the Mermaid Avenue bus for many years; Sharon Tera, whose parents owned a popular Boardwalk restaurant; and Alan Kirschenbaum, one of the original tenants of Coney Island Houses.

Carlos Quinones, 72, is a Coney Island resident who lived in Gravesend Houses as a boy. He is well known in the neighborhood for his collection of classic cars. Quinones is a Vietnam War veteran and a retired MTA employee. In this oral history he shares memories of working games from age 14, placing the Puerto Rican flag atop the Parachute Jump in the 1970s, and driving the Mermaid Avenue bus. 

Born in 1947, Sharon Tera lived in Coney Island for the first 14 years of her life. Her parents, Ethel and Ise Tera, owned Ethel's Restaurant on the Boardwalk at West 19th Street. "Between my mother being Jewish and my father Japanese, we had a combination of that kind of food," Tera says. "So we had chicken noodle soup, we had clam chowder. Or you could just get fried shrimp in a hot dog bun." Tera shares childhood memories of mastering Skee-Ball at neighboring arcades, learning to develop photos at the photo studio next door, and having free run of Washington Baths and Steeplechase Park. 

Alan Kirschenbaum grew up in Coney Island Houses, where his family was among the original tenants of Coney’s first superblock high-rise housing project. They lived there from 1956 until 1966. He vividly describes the architecture and amenities of the buildings, where the windows were designed to bring in the ocean breezes, the kids played sports on the "Little Grass," and the summers seemed endless. Among his amusement park memories are Steeplechase Park's giant slide and Astroland's diving bells, rocket and trout fishing pool.

More than 400 oral histories are available for listening in the Coney Island History Project’s multilingual online archive. Please listen, share, and if you or someone you know would like to record a story via phone or Zoom, sign up here. We record oral histories in English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish and other languages with people who have lived or worked in Coney Island and nearby neighborhoods or have a special connection to these places.

Photo Credits: Charles Denson, Sharon Tera

Charles Denson, director of the Coney Island History Project, tabled at It's My Estuary Day on Coney Island Creek in Kaiser Park, held on June 4th. The annual event is organized by the New York State Marine Education Association in partnership with the NYC Parks Department and participating organizations. Activities included a beach clean-up, underwater oyster reef observation via a remote operated vehicle, seining, and kayaking. More than 150 students from three boroughs plus Yonkers were in attendance.

It is currently horseshoe crab monitoring season at Kaiser Park and Calvert Vaux Park. The crabs are counted and tagged at the beach at high tide to assess the health and well being of this important species. If you wish to volunteer, please choose the site and date via this link and contact the site coordinator to schedule.

In late May, the City’s Economic Development Corporation met with Coney Island residents to provide updates on the Coney Island ferry project. Officials announced that plans to bring a ferry to Kaiser Park were delayed indefinitely, citing “significant sand shift" where the dock is proposed, according to an article in The City. The narrow channel approach for the ferry is dangerous and prone to shoaling and sand buildup that can cause ferries to run aground at low tide. This serious problem and others were pointed out many times at public meetings and in written comments over the last two years, but the warnings were ignored by City officials who wanted to push the project through. New locations for the ferry dock are now being considered.

Photo Credit: Charles Denson

The Coney Island History Project's exhibition center opens for the 2022 season on Saturday, May 28th, of Memorial Day Weekend. Since the History Project's inception in 2004 with a portable recording booth on the Boardwalk and the inaugural season of our exhibition center in 2007, we have proudly offered "Free Admission for One and All!” The exhibition center is open free of charge on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays (1:00PM-7:00PM) from Memorial Day Weekend through Labor Day. We're located at 3059 West 12th Street, adjacent to the West 12th Street entrance to Deno's Wonder Wheel Park, just a few steps off the Boardwalk.

Visitors can view historic artifacts, photographs, maps, ephemera and films of Coney Island's colorful past. You're invited to take free souvenir photos with "Cy," the mesmerizing Spook-A-Rama Cyclops, and Coney Island's only original Steeplechase horse from the legendary ride that gave Steeplechase Park its name. Our rarest treasure on display is Coney Island's oldest surviving artifact from the dawn of the "World's Playground." The 1823 Toll House sign in our collection dates back to the days when the toll for a horse and rider to "the Island" was 5 cents! Visitors can also share and preserve their Coney Island memories by recording an oral history for our multilingual archive, which has over 400 interviews available for online listening.

The Coney Island History Project's special exhibition for the 2022 season is "Barbara Rosenberg: Coney Island Street Photography, 1964-2010," on view from May 28 through September 5, 2022. Barbara Rosenberg (1938-2016) was born and raised in New York City, where she lived her entire life. She was the consummate New Yorker, a social worker who dedicated her life to street photography here, and around the world. Barbara began taking photos as a kid and always had a camera with her. "I was drawn to photography after seeing the photographic images of the French photographers Doisneau, Brassaï, and Cartier-Bresson," she said, "New York City became my canvas, the streets and Coney Island especially, supplied me with an unending source of images."