Coney Island Beach

Coney Island is a beach at the southern edge of Brooklyn, reachable on the subway from Manhattan in about forty minutes. It runs roughly four kilometres from Sea Gate to Brighton Beach, with the Riegelmann Boardwalk along the back of it and the amusement district behind that.

It invented an idea. By 1900 three competing amusement parks — Steeplechase, Luna Park, Dreamland — had turned a bathing resort into the first mass-entertainment destination in America, drawing crowds counted in millions. Most of that burned or was demolished, but two rides survive as landmarks: the Wonder Wheel of 1920 and the Cyclone of 1927, a wooden coaster still running on its original structure. The Nathan's hot dog stand opened in 1916 and its July contest is broadcast nationally.

The beach itself is broad quartz sand, entirely maintained — the boardwalk was built in 1923 and the beach widened along with it, and the city has replenished the sand repeatedly since, most substantially after Hurricane Sandy flooded the whole district in 2012. The Atlantic here is cold until midsummer and the swimming is lifeguarded within marked zones.

Development is a working New York neighbourhood, not a resort: apartment blocks behind the amusement strip, the aquarium at the eastern end, and Brighton Beach beyond it, which has been the centre of Russian-speaking Brooklyn since the 1970s. The boardwalk is the connective tissue and is busy from May through September.

Loud, crowded, reachable by subway and entirely unsanitised, which is most of the appeal. Coney Island is where mass leisure was invented and it has never pretended to be elegant. Come for the boardwalk, the Cyclone and the sense of a New York that predates the one outside; do not come expecting quiet or a clean line. The aquarium at the eastern end and the Mermaid Parade in June are the other two reasons to make the trip.