Coney Island, Las Vegas, poker, and prison: a life on the edge
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Content type: Oral History Item
Coney Island native Larry Namer founded the E! Entertainment cable network and sold it for $3 billion.
Billionaire media mogul Larry Namer is a Coney Island success story.
Namer is a visionary who grew up in Coney Island and went on to found the groundbreaking E! Entertainment cable network, a media powerhouse that he later sold for $3 billion....
Content type: Oral History Item
Gravesend-born novelist whose work is set on the Southern Brooklyn block where he was raised
William Boyle is the author of eight books set in and around the Southern Brooklyn neighborhood of Gravesend, where he was born and raised. His first novel, Gravesend, was published in 2013 and his newest, Saint of the Narrows Street, came out in...
Content type: Oral History Item
Bensonhurst-born photographer whose work documents Coney Island from the mid-1960s to early '70s
Born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in the mid-1940s, Stephen Salmieri was inspired to become a photographer after seeing the "Family of Man" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts, he began...
Content type: Oral History Item
Award-winning roller coaster designer looks back on riding the Cyclone 1,001 consecutive times in 1975
Fifty years ago this month, on August 14, 1975, seventeen-year-old Mike Boodley set a Guinness world record for consecutive roller coaster rides by riding the Coney Island Cyclone 1,001 times over 45 hours. He shares vivid memories of the ride, how...
Content type: Oral History Item
Great grandson of Coney Island sign painter Harry Wildman and grandson of Steeplechase's Vito Onorato
Randy Profeta is the great grandson of Harry Wildman, who was Coney Island's premier sign painter from the 1890s until he died in 1930, after which his sons Lester and Sidney continued the business through the 1950s. Profeta shares family stories...
Content type: Oral History Item
The secret story behind the construction of Coney Island's $350 million Stillwell Avenue Terminal
Anthony D’Amico tells the secret inside story of how Coney Island’s $350 million dollar Stillwell Avenue Terminal came into being. D'Amico was the Chief Financial Officer in charge of funding billions of dollars in MTA mega-projects, including the...
Content type: Oral History Item
Tales of her father's Mermaid Avenue pharmacy, from the 1940s to 1969
Dr. Ina Bendis's father, Charles Bendis, owned a pharmacy on Mermaid Avenue at West 23rd Street in Coney Island. B&B Drug Company, operated on the Avenue until 1969. Dr Bendis grew up in Coney Island and Sea Gate and tells a loving story about...
Content type: Oral History Item
Coney Island during the Great Depression and World War II
95-year-old Rita Kaminsky describes growing up in Coney Island during the 1930s and 1940s. Rita was born at home in the family's apartment above her grandmother's store at 2717 Surf Avenue. In this interview she shares memories of life during the...
Content type: Oral History Item
Jimmy and Tina's Famous Sausage Restaurant
The Smaldone family's Famous Sausage Restaurant began as a hole-in-the-wall food stand below the Atlantis Bar on Stillwell Avenue in the mid-1950s. Italian immigrant Vincenzo (Jimmy) Smaldone and his wife Tina later moved it to a larger space...
Content type: Oral History Item