Something about the seashore lends itself to nostalgia—something to do with childhood memories, or the ceaseless murmur of the waves, or maybe too much sun.

It is probably no surprise, then, that our latest exercise in nostalgia has washed up on the shore of Coney Island. Baseball is back in Brooklyn, in a fine little park along Surf Avenue, with a view of the beach and the boardwalk from the grandstand. This is minor-league baseball, no less, a particularly insistent, suburban form of nostalgia—one in which the ballplayers still hustle for pennies a day, and little kids get to run around the bases after the games are over.

It remains to be seen whether publicly subsidized baseball can spark an economic turnaround in Coney Island, as we have been promised. Yet its advent does underscore a major shift in how we as a nation now go about having fun.

Coney Island is where fun was invented, at least that peculiarly American manifestation of fun known as the amusement park. For most of its history, fun on Coney meant something fast and new, something a little risqué, something outrageous and even dangerous. The roller coaster was perfected, after all, on Coney Island, and sex was always a big draw.

The very spot where the Brooklyn Cyclones now roam was once Steeplechase Park, where nearly every ride was designed to throw members of opposite sexes together—albeit at bone-crunching speeds. Women descending from mechanical horses on the Steeplechase’s track found their dresses blown up by hidden jets of air, while men and women alike were attacked by a leering dwarf in a harlequin costume, armed with a cattle prod. At one point, the island featured a 150-foot-tall, tin-and-wood hotel, built in the shape of an elephant, with glowing yellow eyes, an observatory in its houdah and rooms full of prostitutes.

Elsewhere you could visit a village built entirely to the proportions of some 300 dwarves and midgets who lived there year-round. Or at the Infantorium, you could see for a few cents the life-and-death struggle of premature babies in their incubators. You could see aboriginal tribesmen from around the world, recreations of the latest natural disasters, the first motion pictures, the shape of wars to come—and the technological marvel that was Coney itself.

By 1910, the three immense and wondrous parks that straddled the waterfront—Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland—were limned in millions of individual lightbulbs. This spectacle required enough power to light an American city of some half-million souls, and the generators were tourist attractions in their own right, featuring gold and enamel instruments and murals illustrating the history of electricity.

It was no coincidence that this Coney Island flourished during the height of the immigrant era. New Americans came to see their worst fears and their best hopes for the future, not to mention new thrills and sensations of every kind. The more shocking, the more titillating, the more novel, the better.

Perhaps it is a sign of maturity that we are no longer so forward-looking or frantic in our entertainment—that instead we crave the familiar, the reassuring, the nostalgic. Amusement palaces are still built on the scale of the old Coney, but inside they resemble nothing more than shopping malls with slot machines in every corner.

In much the same way, the arrival of the Brooklyn Cyclones is meant to tame and homogenize Coney Island. Yet other attempts to sanitize Coney have also failed. It remains a marginal place in the city, and very much a place of immigrants, particularly the Russian and Jewish immigrants who have opened the small shops and flea markets that now dot Surf Avenue. The city seems to want to drive out these businesses in favor of some unspecified new development. Yet chances are it will be the newest Americans who write the future of Coney Island, no matter how nice a memory we build in the sand.

© Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company