Snuck away from the heat and the city this Tuesday morning for a swim off Brighton Beach/Coney Island, camera tucked away in my buoy dry bag.
New York is never more beautiful than when seen from the water, or so it felt this morning, swimming past the nearly-hundred year-old Cyclone roller coaster and Wonder Wheel, Ruby's Bar and Paul's Daughter. And always the red steel tower of the Parachute Jump, like the fluke of a whale vanishing into Coney Island Channel.
By 10 am, the temperature was up to 93 degrees and someone was already blasting reggaeton from one of the restaurants on the boardwalk, but out here, some 150 yards from land, it was just me and cormorants on the jetty and some stray dragonflies (nothing like last Sunday, when there were swarms and it took 5 minutes of steady swimming to clear it. The experience reminded me of the passage in Lynne Cox’s Grayson when she’s swimming amidst the grunion, only the dragonflies were in the air, but still as deftly skimming around me).
This stretch of Brighton Beach and Coney Island beachfront is layered with history, some of which still stands, but most of which exists only in maps, photos, and oral history (much of it collected by the Coney Island History Project). The open water swimmers meet up at Grimaldo's Chair on the beach at Brighton 4th Street. The standard route is a 2-mile out-and-back to Steeplechase Pier, at about West 17th Street in Coney Island.
The New York Aquarium serves as the unofficial halfway point for “Grimaldo’s mile.” More than that, it geographically and psychically divides the residential beachfront stretch of Brighton Beach from the amusement area of Coney Island. After you pass the aquarium going west, you know you've moved from the land of ex-Soviets to that of kitsch, play, and vice (well, maybe you haven't left the ex-Soviets behind after all), or at least what's left of the city's playland. It's these remains that fascinate me every time I swim by, and the particular experience of sighting this sliver of NYC history from the water. Do we see our cities any differently when immersed in their waterways? Do we have a more “immersive” experience, or feel more connected in some bodily way to places once we’ve swum in them?
The aquarium at West 8th Street, wedged between the Cyclone to the west and the boardwalk and beach to the south, occupies the site of Dreamland, one of the four great amusement parks of Coney Island (in addition to Luna, Steeplechase, and Astroland), all now burned down/demolished/sold off/rezoned. Of them all, Dreamland was the shortest-lived. Opened in 1904, it went bankrupt in 1910 and burned down in 1911. Its name and its brevity, as well as its neoclassical, hallucinatory elegance, make it feel like the most haunting and ephemeral of the four.
The park’s 375-foot tall Beacon Tower was at the time the tallest structure in Coney Island, and a replica of Sevilla’s cathedral bell tower. Today’s abandoned but at least landmarked Parachute Jump, by way of comparison, is 250 feet tall and feels looming enough as I swim toward it heading out toward the pier, using it to sight. I feel dizzy just thinking about what it would be like to swim beneath the Giralda replica.
The aquarium does not loom but slinks and glints and flows alongside me. Both the wide, hot expanse of sand and the silver skin of the aquarium seem like a mirage, especially as I breathe from within a trough of a wave and the land momentarily falls away from sight.
In the first photo above, aquarium is the first building on the right; in the second, directly in the middle.
The aquarium came to Coney in 1957, a controversial move that, according to historian Charles Denson, took 16 years and cost $11 million to taxpayers. Like most controversial or downright unpopular mid-20th century urban projects, it was Robert Moses’ doing. Until 1941, the city aquarium was located in Castle Clinton in Battery Park, where it was doing well enough. At its new Coney Island location, on the other hand, it became "a financial disaster and sparsely attended," according to Denson. It got better, but has never been the tourist draw of other urban aquariums, like Boston’s, Baltimore’s, or Atlanta’s. It’s such a schlepp, after all, and one can’t help but suspect Moses of exiling the aquarium for nefarious political reasons.
Today, the building has been renovated after much destruction during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The long-awaited shark exhibit has opened this summer, which I still haven't visited—and almost feel like I don't need to, what with all the sand sharks washing up on the beach lately (but that's another story for another post).
The building housing the shark exhibit resembles a shark in profile, the deck of a boat, a school of fish, light on cresting waves. It's wrapped in a 1,100-foot-long “Shimmer Wall” that was designed in collaboration with environmental artist Ned Kahn to capture something of the fluidity of the ocean. This dynamic facade includes more than 33,000 aluminum "flappers" that flow with the wind. When I view it from the water, I have the impression of catching sight of a giant herring, all scales and iridescence.
Some days, when the current is flowing out east, it feels like it takes forever to get past the aquarium. Once I do, the scene abruptly changes, the spirals and loops of the Cyclone come into view, I can hear the first drifts of music from the boardwalk. Goodbye Dreamland, hello erstwhile Astroland, today's Luna Park.
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