Coney Island had three big amusement parks: Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland. All three are gone. Fire, money trouble and bulldozers took them between 1911 and 1966. The public beach in front of them is still free and still open. The Luna Park open today is a newer park that opened in 2010.
Before the big parks
People came to this sand long before the big rides. A railroad first reached Coney Island in 1864. In the 1870s, 35 cents bought a train ride on the Culver line to Surf Avenue. Large hotels went up at the east end. President Ulysses S. Grant presided at the opening of the Manhattan Beach Hotel in July 1877. Its developer, Austin Corbin, barred Jewish guests. On July 21, 1879, he gave his anti-Jewish interview to the New York Daily Herald. A local history site says the press and Christian clergy almost all condemned him. In 2007 the city renamed Corbin Place for a different Corbin: Margaret Corbin, a Revolutionary War patriot.
The early amusements were small and loose. A hotel shaped like an elephant had telescopes in its eyes. A Brooklyn Public Library history says it was working as a brothel by 1890. It burned on September 27, 1896. Sea Lion Park opened in 1895. Wikipedia calls it Coney Island's first amusement area to charge an entry fee.
Steeplechase Park, 1897 to 1964
George Tilyou saw the big Ferris wheel at the 1893 Chicago fair on his honeymoon. He came home and built a half-size copy on Surf Avenue. In 1897 he opened Steeplechase Park. It was meant for families. Drinking, gambling and prostitution were banned. Later he added a gate and a 25-cent admission charge to keep out the rougher crowd.
Early on July 29, 1907, a fire started in a ride called the Cave of the Winds. About 35 acres of Coney Island burned. The next morning Tilyou put up a sign: “Admission to the burning ruins - ten cents.” He paid to rebuild by selling 100,000 shares. Anyone who bought a $5 stock certificate got a season pass. The city had passed a law limiting wooden buildings, so he rebuilt in steel and concrete. The centerpiece was the Pavilion of Fun, a steel-and-glass hall 450 by 280 feet.
Steeplechase outlived its rivals, but not without harm. In 1933, fifty-seven people were hurt when an overcrowded balcony collapsed. A fire in September 1939 injured 18 people and did $200,000 in damage. In 1941 the owners, Frank Tilyou and George Tilyou Jr., brought in the Parachute Jump from the 1939 World's Fair. They paid $150,000 for it. Riders were pulled up a 250-foot tower and dropped under a parachute. Up to half a million people rode it each season.
War and race shaped the park too. In 1945, with men away in the draft, only 70 people worked at Steeplechase. In a normal year it took 300. In 1946 the operators of its pool used a season-pass system that, in Wikipedia's words, “effectively locked out African Americans from using the pool.”
Steeplechase closed for the last time on September 20, 1964. Marie Tilyou, the main stockholder, sold the family's Coney Island land to developer Fred Trump over the objections of her brothers and sisters. The website 6sqft dates the sale to February 1965. Untapped New York says 1964. Untapped also reports that Trump bid through a stand-in named Jimmy Onorato, hoping a hidden buyer would get a better price.
Steeplechase did not open for the 1965 season. In 1966 (the date 6sqft gives), while people were working to make it a landmark, Trump held a demolition party. Guests were invited to throw bricks at the front of Steeplechase. Untapped says he hired models in revealing outfits to parade out front, and that guests smashed the Pavilion of Fun's stained glass. Then he bulldozed the building at night. Untapped says this limited any pending landmark case. We found no other source that confirms this motive.
The steel tower was spared. Trump wanted to sell the Parachute Jump for scrap. He did not think it was old enough to be a landmark. Sources still disagree on when it last carried riders. Coney Island historian Charles Denson says 1964 and calls 1968 a repeated error. NYC Parks and engineer Helen Harrison say 1968. The Brooklyn Paper says 1965. The city voted in 1968 to buy the Steeplechase site for $4 million. In 1971 Parks tried to auction off the tower and got no bids. 6sqft calls it all that is left of Steeplechase.
Trump never got the zoning change he needed to build housing on the land. He leased it to Norman Kaufman, who ran a small kiddie park there. The city, which bought the site from Trump in 1969, ended that lease in 1981. Denson wrote that when Steeplechase “failed to open for the 1965 season,” the news “created a worldwide impression that the whole of Coney Island had closed.” A minor-league ballpark opened on the old grounds in 2001.
Luna Park, 1903 to 1944
Thompson and Dundy built Luna Park. Before it opened, in January 1903, they killed an elephant named Topsy on the site, first with electricity and then with cyanide. Wikipedia says Edison's film company recorded it.
At 8 p.m. on May 16, 1903, the park's lights came on. Five minutes later the gates opened to 45,000 people. Admission was ten cents, and some rides cost up to 25 cents more. On the Fourth of July that year, 142,000 people came. The owners had spent $700,000 but advertised the cost as $1 million. In less than three months they earned back 90 percent of it. Within its first few years, Luna Park drew five million guests a year.
One of Luna's first attractions was an infant incubator exhibit. Martin Couney kept premature babies alive in incubators and charged the public 25 cents to look. He never charged the parents. Doctors did not accept incubators until the 1930s, so Couney ran his care as a show. The Coney Island History Project says his Luna exhibit ran from 1903 until 1943. Arizona State University's Embryo Project says from 1904. Historians now believe he was not a medical doctor. The usual count, which traces back to Couney's own claims, is more than 8,000 babies treated and over 6,500 who lived. Lucille Horn, one of his babies in 1920, said later: “I think it was definitely more of a freak show.”
In the Great Depression, Wikipedia says, Luna Park could not compete with Coney Island's beach, “which charged no admission.” Three creditors filed a bankruptcy petition against it in 1933. In World War II it had to keep its lights dim for security. On August 13, 1944, a fire destroyed much of the park and did $800,000 in damage. Sources differ on when Luna Park finally closed. Wikipedia's Luna Park article says the eastern half closed in September 1944. 6sqft says the park closed in 1946. Either way, it never reopened as a full park. 6sqft says the land was razed and rezoned for housing in 1950.
Dreamland, to 1911
Dreamland was the third big park. It was running by 1904, when Couney opened a second incubator exhibit there. A fire destroyed Dreamland in 1911. The Brooklyn Paper says it began when light bulbs popped over workers who were sealing a leak in the Hellgate water ride with tar. The Brooklyn Paper also says a burning lion ran down Surf Avenue and climbed the Ben-Hur ride. The day after the fire, manager Samuel Gumpertz pitched a tent on the still-smoking ground and opened a sideshow. 6sqft says Robert Moses later moved the New York Aquarium onto the old Dreamland site to keep another amusement park from opening.
The beach that stayed
For most of the park years, the sand was not open to everyone. By the middle of the 19th century, private owners had split up the waterfront and put up barriers. Some fences ran into the water. One 1904 estimate put the public beachfront at 1.4 square inches for each of the city's 3.7 million people. In 1912 only one street, West 23rd, gave the public a direct path from Surf Avenue to the beach.
That year New York State sued the amusement owners for taking the beach as private property. In 1913 a judge ruled that the beach belonged to the state, not to Tilyou and the other owners. An appeals court agreed in 1916, with an exception for part of Steeplechase. The city broke ground on a boardwalk on October 1, 1921, the day it took title to the land. The street work condemned 288 lots, including 175 houses and part of Steeplechase. NYC Parks says the beach project took 1.7 million cubic yards of sand and added 2.5 million square feet of beach. The first part of the boardwalk opened in October 1922, and the full length opened on May 15, 1923. Borough President Riegelmann, whose name it carries, said that “poor people will no longer have to stand with their faces pressed against wire fences looking at the ocean.”
The new beach could hold more than half a million people, and it needed to. Once the subway reached Coney Island in 1920, the trip from the city cost a nickel. By then up to a million people filled the island on the hottest days. The Parks Department took over the boardwalk in 1938. Parks Commissioner Robert Moses said the beaches “were never properly planned” and complained that the contractor had been allowed to dump brown sand. Between 1938 and 1941, Parks covered the beach with a 2-foot layer of fine white sand. Wikipedia says Moses described the beach as so crowded that bathers had less room than in a coffin. The V&A dates a Weegee beach photograph, “Coney Island,” to 1940.
What came after
After the war, the city moved toward housing. On April 2, 1953, the New York Times reported that Moses had proposed rezoning Coney Island for homes. Low-income housing projects went up starting in 1954. A smaller space-themed park, Astroland, opened in 1962. In 1975 its owners took over the Cyclone, a 1927 wooden coaster the city had planned to tear down. Astroland closed on September 7, 2008. A new Luna Park opened on its site on May 29, 2010. In 2025 a state advisory panel voted 4 to 2 against advancing a $3 billion casino development beside the boardwalk.
Some of the old sites are still easy to find. The Parachute Jump marks the Steeplechase grounds, and the ballpark stands on them. 6sqft says the aquarium stands on the old Dreamland site. The Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone still run. The beach that was once fenced off is now free and open to the public.
