A small but fascinating museum of Coney Island memorabilia. Currently on display you can see such Coney Island lacunae as a steeplechase horse, funhouse distortion mirrors, and vintage bumping cars.
The museum embodies the spirit of Coney Island USA, a non-profit that was founded in the belief "that 19th century American popular culture gave birth to a democratic cultural golden age, unique to this country’s history and indispensable to its future. This new age not only invented the Broadway musical, it gave the world jazz, the blues and many new forms of performing and visual arts that emerged from and looked to the populist masses. Now, limited arts funding tends to favor the conservative and classical fine arts, underestimating the seminal qualities of the popular arts, instead abandoning the populist arts to the mutli-billion dollar mass media industries. But the honky-tonk subculture that was once uniquely Coney Island has reemerged as a post-modern trend in entertainment and art. The world is cautiously, slowly, but most certainly reawakening to the importance of Coney Island in American popular culture, and what it stands for. Coney Island USA is there to document, preserve and further the unique arts for the masses, providing national perspective, professional dedication and quality programming for Coney Island as it heads into the 21st century."
Coney Island Museum is located in the Coney Island neighborhood of Manhattan. Almost a century before the boardwalk opened along the Atlantic Ocean, Coney Island was on its way to becoming the nation’s most popular pleasure ground. In 1824, the Coney Island House was established as a seaside resort, and within a few decades it was attracting a steady stream of visitors, including celebrities. At the turn of the century, amusement parks—Sea Lion Park, Steeplechase Park, Luna Park, and Dreamland—offered rides, concessions and entertainment on a spectacular scale. Today, Coney Island continues to reinvent itself with new businesses flocking to the always-developing hotspot. Most notable is the renovated and reopened Luna Park, which operated from 1903 to 1944 before closing, only to reopen to much fanfare and local excitement in 2010. Other historic attractions include Deno's Wonder Wheel, an unconventional, "eccentric" Ferris wheel; and the Cyclone, a wooden roller coaster so synonymous with Coney Island that it was declared a New York City landmark in 1988 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places three years later. The Cyclone is so famous, in fact, that the Mets' minor league team, the Brooklyn Cyclones, take their name from the historic ride. The Cyclones—one of the New York Mets' minor league teams—play their games at MCU Park, located along the Coney Island boardwalk. On the far end of the boardwalk's main stretch, families enjoy the New York Aquarium, with its thousands of marine creatures, including beluga whales, bottlenose dolphins, and stingrays, and exhibitions like the Sea Cliffs, a 300-foot-long recreation of the rocky Pacific Coast.
There are no events taking place on this date.