Steeplechase Pier, Coney Island

If "resilient" can mean "being rebuilt again and again," then the Pat Auletta Steeplechase Pier at Coney Island is resilient as advertised (on the sign at its entrance). Its most recent iteration opened Oct. 2, 2013 after Hurricane Sandy had destroyed it the previous year. But the history of this thousand-foot (and now T-shaped) pier goes back to 1904, seven years after Coney Island's famed Steeplechase Park had first opened. Since then the pier has died and lived again, died and lived again.

Steeplechase Pier lies just off the site of the Parachute Jump, an iconic relic that's often thought of as the only remnant of the Steeplechase amusement park. But the pier has been here, in one form or another, much longer than that long-retired thrill ride, and is four times as long as the Parachute Jump is high. (Historical note: The Jump was actually built for the 1939 World's Fair, transported to Steeplechase in 1941, decommissioned when the amusement park shut down in the '60s, and preserved to this day through sheer community will).

Above: the Parachute Jump as seen from Steeplechase Pier
Above: looking west from the start of Steeplechase Pier
Above: looking west from a little farther out on Steeplechase Pier

On our recent visit, one of the first sites on the pier itself was a "Prayer Station" making an attempt to display an ecumenical or even nondenominational spirit.

Much more lively was a percussion party a little farther out.

The main activity at the far end of the pier is fishing. The designers of the present pier provided some fishing infrastructure along with a separate raised walkway so promenaders can not only view the wide ocean but watch the fisherfolk without getting in their way.

One fisherman (not pictured) landed a skate just as we approached. (I think this is a skate and not a stingray – I don't see a stinger.) Displaying it on the plastic-wood floorboards for the gathering crowd to photograph and admire, he explained that he would not eat the charismatic creature but would throw it back, which he proceeded to do after a bit of a struggle to get the hook out of its mouth. He rhapsodized about how the catch was a gift from God, provided so that we all could appreciate the bountiful variety of life in the ocean right here off the teeming beaches of Coney Island. It's a nice thought – maybe he was inspired at the Prayer Station.

Steeplechase Pier became the Pat Auletta Steeplechase Pier in honor of a man known as "Mr. Coney Island" or the "Mayor of Coney Island" (and father of writer Ken Auletta). From the 1940s to the '60s Pat Auletta and his wife Nettie ran Pat's Sporting Equipment on Stillwell Avenue, then managed the Abe Stark Skating Rink for NYC Parks until the 1980s. Auletta's 1991 New York Times obituary bears a correction that's so New York: "Because of an editing error, an obituary in some editions yesterday about Pat V. Auletta, a member of Community Board 13 in New York City, referred incorrectly to Coney Island. It is in Brooklyn, not Queens."

It sure is!

All photos © Critical Lens Media

Kaiser Park

Back in June of this year, a trial-run ferry took a boatload of ferry-boosters from Wall Street to Coney Island. The folks behind this proposed new service conducted the one-time trip to demonstrate how the line would run, and to raise funds to improve the pier at Coney Island Creek where the ferries would dock.

On the way we passed barges and tugs, and crossed under the Verrazano Bridge, impressive and sometimes even sublime sights but common enough ones for New Yorkers.

What isn't commonly seen by most New Yorkers is Coney Island Creek itself.

Before I began this park odyssey, I'd been to Coney Island by subway, by car, and by bicycle. I knew you didn't have to cross a body of water to get there. So why Coney Island? Because it was an island once. And a clue to that history is Coney Island Creek, which separates the western part of the "island" from Brooklyn's Gravesend neighborhood.

The creek begins as an inlet off Gravesend Bay. As the ferry entered the inlet we saw, to our surprise, a sandy beach with a handful of people on it.

This isn't part of the famous beach at Coney Island where millions of people cavort every summer. That's along the south coast. This, by contrast, is an untended stretch of sandy land off a completely different part of the island, facing north toward "mainland" Brooklyn.

Further into the Creek we spotted a number of boats washed up and left to rot last year by Sandy, and a more historic wreck: the Yellow Submarine, hand-built by a man who wanted to use it to raise the Andrea Doria.

A man, probably wondering what a big ferryboat was doing drifting around in Coney Island Creek, serenaded us on the tuba.

The return trip saw us through a spectacular sunset. But it left us wondering what that beach was, and the grassy areas adjacent to it, and how could we get there?

So one recent weekend we set off to find out. From the Stillwell Ave./Coney Island subway station we walked up to Neptune Ave. and headed west to where, according to the map, the creek bent south. Sure enough, water came into view after a while. At first we thought a glimpse through a gas station fence was the best we'd get.

But then we found the entrance to Kaiser Park, which is right by Mark Twain Intermediate School for the Gifted and Talented, and is named for a principal of that school back when it was more humbly known as Mark Twain Junior High School. Nearby, too, is a huge Greenthumb garden, more of a farm than a garden, with a big variety of crops growing, and even people working in the fields.

And then, as we entered the park: Payoff!

Here's the yellow submarine again, this time from shore.

I can't resist the visual fascination of once-developed or industrial but currently non-landscaped shoreline. I had to look twice to realize this was a drain.

Aside from a few people setting up to shoot a video in one of Kaiser Park's many athletic fields, the only major activity on this particular day was fishing.

A big tidal mudflat was filled in to create the 26-acre park, beneath which, according to a historical sign, "numerous shipwrecks lie." If you dug up and fixed up all the shipwrecks buried around New York City's hundreds of miles of coastline and gave them to the ancient Greeks, they could try again and really conquer Sicily this time.

At the far western end of the waterside path, an avenue of trees leads back out to the street.

Here at the western end the park per se comes to an end, but go through an opening and there it is: the mysterious beach we saw from the ferry. Untended, hardly anyone there. A father and son, a couple of lovers, a kayaker, and a guy wading way out into the middle of the cove with a fishing net.

There you have it. New York City and its parks: a place of endless endlessness and infinite discovery. Next up: Calvert Vaux Park, on the other side of the creek. Stay tuned.

Tilyou Playground

When, at the beginning of the present century, the Muss Development Corporation built the Oceana Condominium and Club on the site of the old Brighton Beach Baths (1907-1994) in the face of some ineffectual opposition, it also funded the creation of a new city park and playground. It was one of those real estate deals where the developer agrees to create a public space in exchange for something the city grants it – a zoning change, an easement, something it needs.

Tilyou Playground is actually two separate pieces of land along Brighton Beach Ave., one an actual playground and therefore of no interest to this blog, the other an actual park, with benches and grass and trees – real trees, not plastic ones, as these exposed root systems prove. (Maybe Muss was worried the city would suspect some sort of vegetation fraud.)

In a fairly small space, the park welcomes both the old…

…and the young.

Just what is a Tilyou, you ask? The Tilyous were among Coney Island's first entrepreneurs. Peter Tilyou founded the Surf House and Surf Theater in the 1860s, and in the 1890s he and his son built the legendary Steeplechase Park, an amusement park whose name resounds to this day despite the fact that it closed in 1964.

Steeplechase Park itself lives on in its one remaining artifact: the famous Parachute Jump. No one jumps from it anymore, but this year it was (to coin a phrase) "re-blung" with cascading multicolored lights.

Coney Island Beach and Boardwalk

Coney Island is so storied, and so copiously documented, that with all the times I've been there I never thought to document it here. But the Parks Department has had jurisdiction over the beach and the historic boardwalk since 1938. That makes it a park!

Around 1938 is also when the boardwalk acquired the name Riegelmann Boardwalk, after the Brooklyn Borough President who began the process of making the whole place open to the public and whipping it into the shape it has today.

This'll be short and sweet – or at least short – because I took these humble Coney Island photos on a quest to find much more obscure – and therefore, to me, more interesting – parkland.

Here's that famous boardwalk, with the Aquarium in the distance on the right and beyond it the rides of the amusement areas.

You want beach? Here's some beach.

The 2.7-mile-long boardwalk contains 1.3 million boards. You notice damage as you tread them, at least some of which came from Superstorm Sandy. There's talk of replacing the whole shebang with concrete and plastic for greater durability. Controversial, of course.

For now, wooden boards still rule. Follow them east from the amusement parks and you come to the Brighton Beach section, where you hear mostly Russian on the boardwalk as well as the streets. The seaside restaurants in the next photo serve heavy Russian food of middling quality, but you can't beat the location.

Most people don't follow the Riegelmann Boardwalk all the way to its far east end. So I've done it for you.

Go elsewhere for blazing images of the Wonder Wheel, the Cyclone, Nathan's (and its hot dog eating contest), the boardwalk bar scene and all the craziness that goes with it, and the fab ballpark where the minor league Cyclones play. Go to other websites to see pictures of the happy beach frolickers and assorted New York eccentrics who give this place its legendary character. But come back here for what's next up: some Coney Island parks the tourists and revelers never see.