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| Astro Tower is the thin white needle just right of center and right of Thunderbolt, with West 15th Street between them. |
The occasion for my tower quest this morning is the 10-year anniversary this Saturday of Astroland's closure (1962-2008). To commemorate the last great vanished amusement park of Coney, the Coney Island History Project is hosting a day of events, including a film screening at Deno's WonderWheel Park and a reunion for former Astroland employees. Can you be nostalgic for a place you've never been? You can, because I am.
You may have heard of Astro Tower, even if you've never ridden it, from its July 2013 fiasco, when it started to sway, causing the evacuation of Luna Park and surrounding areas. The structure was demolished and apparently the parts carted away to junk shops. The new tower reopened this May to much pomp. The views, I'm sure, are stunning, and the height at 137 feet is not bad, but sad compared to its former 275 feet. I'm not impressed from the water. The Parachute Jump at 250 feet will now and hopefully always remain the Eiffel Tower of Coney Island, and its imposing steel fluke will be the most uncanny and imposing landmark on the Coney skyline. If only it could be brought back as a ride, but since the Jump has landmark status (thankfully), it would have to be restored to its exact prior condition, making operations prohibitively expensive.
So for now, I continue to mostly ignore Astro Tower and set my compass to the Parachute Jump. Between the Jump, Astro Tower, and the ghost of the Giralda Tower replica in the vanished Dreamland amusement park (see my August post), I'm coming to think of Coney Island as a landscape of ghostly, uncanny towers, like something out of W. G. Sebald. Maybe it's because I hope to overlook the blocky, brutalist high-rise ugliness of the projects and the coops alike (Trump Village towers, between Neptune and Surf, Stillwell and Ocean Pkwy, are of course among the worst offenders), and scan the horizon for more exotic landmarks.
But more than that, when you're horizontal in the water, the sight of looming structures above you is uncanny. Do you ever get that terror feeling in the back of your teeth when you see a giant container ship, or a fleet of them, on the horizon when you're swimming? It's sort of like that. The terror of the horizontal body overwhelmed with looming, giant objects that dwarf it. The Astro Tower is no longer swaying, but it might as well be, as I swim by and feel myself to be very small and friable.
