Towerphobia

Today I finally saw Astro Tower. I mean, really saw it, as in tracked it, breathing to the right swimming out to Steeplechase Pier.

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.

Grimaldo’s Chair to Dreamland

Part 1 of 3 about swimming off Brighton Beach and Coney Island

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.