Coney Island Stories Podcast Returns with Season Two

The Coney Island History Project launches Season Two of our oral history podcast Coney Island Stories on Tuesday, March 8th.

This season’s theme is “Growing Up in Coney Island” through the decades, from the 1930s to the 21st century. In Episode One, Coney Islanders who grew up in the ‘30s, including George Ancona, Charles Berkman, Edith Storch, and Ralph Perfetto, recall hardships as well as simple pleasures. During the Depression, families from other New York City neighborhoods flocked to Coney Island. The rent was cheaper and the beach was down the block.

The oral history narrators in Season Two describe growing up during the Depression and World War II, urban renewal (a narrator whose family was evicted calls it “urban removal”), the residential development of middle-income co-ops and public housing, and the decline of the amusement area and its eventual revival. Across the generations, their commonalities include the beach, the boardwalk, and jobs in the neighborhood, including the amusement area.

Season Two of the podcast series is sponsored in part by an Action Grant from Humanities New York with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. "We’re extremely grateful for the support we’ve received enabling us to record, preserve, and make available so many voices and narratives that tell the fascinating story of Coney Island,” said Charles Denson, executive director of the Coney Island History Project. "Coney Island has an incredibly complex history, and diverse first person accounts provide an irreplaceable resource for the future.”

The podcast is produced by Charles Denson, Ali Lemer and Tricia Vita from oral histories in the Coney Island History Project's archive, which has over 400 interviews.  Among the eleven episodes in Season One of Coney Island Stories are “Schools of Their Own,” “A Century of Bathhouses,” “Beach Days,” “Legendary Roller Coasters,” and “Mermaid Avenue.” Listen and subscribe via your favorite podcast app or at https://www.coneyislandhistory.org/podcast

Categories: 

Comments

Does anyone recall the Fruit and Veggie Emporium located on West 22nd between Surf & Railroad Avenues. Louis, George and Mary Garguilo Proprietors?

Add new comment