Kathy Fenyves

Kathy Fenyves and her family were original tenants of Luna Park Houses' Building 5 with an apartment that looked out on the amusement park. She lived there from 1961, when she was a toddler,  until she was 23, and her parents continued to live there for over 40 years. Fenyves shares stories of how easy it was to make friends in a building where everyone else was new too, going to PS 90 the first day the school opened, playing 45 rpm records and watching the fireworks from her apartment's terrace, and learning to make cotton candy at her summer job as a teen. "Growing up in Coney Island, in retrospect, had to have been the best place to grow up," she says. "It was just an exciting place. You never ran out of things to do. You had so many friends. And you felt like you were on vacation a lot."