On the Boardwalk: Coney Island 1999

Coney Island has been the summer beach playground for New Yorkers for over a century. America’s first large engineered beach fill was the boardwalk and recreational beach on Coney Island in 1922 - 1923 (Farley 1923). With the completion of the project, immigrants and factory workers could escape the sweatshops of the sweltering city and enjoy a (crowded) Sunday at the beach for only a nickel subway ride (Stanton 1999). "The Improvement helped convert nearly 2 miles of shoreline characterized by ramshackle development and narrow to non-existent beaches from which the general public was excluded, to a world famous resort that was accessible to all for no more than the cost of a subway fare." (Dornhelm 2012). Coney Island is part of the borough of Brooklyn.

In the photograph above, the odd mushroom-shaped frame was once a parachute jump, where guests would hop off and float to the ground. The boardwalk has been rebuilt many times.

Coney Island beach pumping in 1922.

Coney Island 1941. From the archives of the Beach Erosion Board, now at the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, US Army Corps of Engineers.

Parachute jump,1941 or 1942 (from Library of Congress, intermediary roll film) fsa 8b00812 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8b00812)

This was the scene at Coney Island on a summer day in 1941 at the eve of World War II. The subway was still a nickel then.

Despite being refurbished and "urban renewed," there are still old structures and remnants of Coney Island's exuberant past.

 There is still an amusement park, but it is small compared to the ones in the 1950s.

Notice the rocket architecture, likely something from the Sputnik era when rockets were modern and trendy.

The famous hotdog stands are still there and thriving. The fries look great, but I may pass on the mystery-meat hotdogs.

This stone structure is known as a terminal groin and was built by the US Army Corps of Engineers at W 37th Street. The reason is convoluted. The community at the west tip of Coney Island is known as Seagate and is closed to the public. By law, beaches which are nourished with Federal funds must be accessible to the general public. Therefore, when the Corps of Engineers performed beach nourishments on Coney Island, the sand had to be restricted to the part of the beach east of W 37th Street (to the right in the photograph).

View across Gravesend Bay to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge from Seagate, Coney Island.

Along this shore, longshore transport is from east to west. Thanks to numerous beach fill projects, sand has filled the project to the seaward end of the 37th Street terminal groin and moves around the tip and to the shore at Seagate. The sand moves around the west end of Coney, past the Coney Island Lighthouse, and into Coney Island Creek. Some residents complained that the beach on the north side of Seagate was too wide (after decades of complaining they were suffering from beach erosion).

Rockaway Beach also has a wide boardwalk and the beach has also been nourished many times to provide storm and flood protection as well as recreation benefits.

I took these photographs with a Leica M3 rangefinder camera with 35mm Summicron-RF (the superb 8-element) and 50mm Summicron (type 4) lenses on Kodak Kodachrome 25 film. I scanned the frames on a Plustek 7600i film scanner using Silverfast Ai software.

References

Dornhelm, R.B., 2012. The Coney Island Public Beach and Boardwalk Improvement of 1923. Fourth Annual Northeast Shore and Beach Preservation Association Conference (NSBPA), October 24-26, 2001 | Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ.

Farley, P. P. 1923. Coney Island public beach and boardwalk improvement. The Municipal Engineers
Journal, Vol. 9, Paper 136, pp 136.1-136.32.

Stanton, J. 1999. “Coney Island - Nickel Empire (1920's-1930's).” (https://www.westland.net/coneyisland/articles/nickelempire.htm, accessed 09/27/2017)

Update, Jan. 19, 2018:  A friend sent me this interesting picture of Coney Island during Hurricane Donna in 1960. The photograph was on Facebook in the "Old Images of Brooklyn" group. Original source is unknown. It looks like it might have been a 4×5 original, so possibly from a press photographer.

Abandoned Rocket Fuel Plant, Redlands, California

Redlands, California, is a historic town on the far east outskirts of the Los Angeles metropolitan area.  The historic core is well-represented by gorgeous Craftsman architecture houses in impeccable condition. But drive to the unincorporated town Mentone, turn north on some gravel roads towards the Santa Ana River wash, and you come across a wasteland of boulder fields, water retention pits, and hulking concrete bunkers. The bunkers are the remains of the Lockheed Propulsion Company, which developed and tested solid fuel rocket motors and propellants for use by the military and NASA between 1961 and 1975. The Grand Central Rocket Company used the site before 1961.

Southern California was, for many decades, one of the prime locations for the United States aerospace industry. After World War II, aircraft companies expanded their operations to encompass the new rocket and space technologies. This accelerated after the 1957 launch of Sputnik and in the 1960s, as we developed equipment and systems for the space race.

These were sturdy buildings, with thick reinforced concrete walls. Some semi-buried bunkers (see the fourth photograph) were made to store highly explosive materials. Bunkers like this are built with thick earthen sides and a thin roof so that an explosion will dissipate its energy vertically into the air. Note the troughs in the floor through which cables and conduits could be routed.

These rectangles contain glass at least 6 inches thick. They were designed for movie cameras to film rocket nozzle exhaust. I have seen windows like this at an old building (no longer extant) at the Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

According to a Wikipedia article, the Lockheed plant closed in 1975 when the last contracts for the Apollo program ended and NASA selected Thiokol to prepare solid propellant for the Space Shuttle booster rockets. Solvents and other toxic chemicals have been measured in water wells in the region. Nevertheless, Lockheed-Martin Corporation has refused to pay for the clean-up of the contamination. Is this not a familiar story?

For more articles on Redlands, please click the links:
1. Restoring the Santa Fe Depot.
2. Historic Redlands High School's Clock Auditorium.
3. A quick tour of Craftsman houses.

For an odd site in the California desert:  Salvation Mountain.

The photographs of the rocket fuel plant are from a compact Yashica Electro 35CC film camera with a fixed 35mm f/1.8 Color-Yashinon lens. My impression is that the lens may be giving slightly more coverage than 35mm, but regardless, it is a handy focal length for street and casual photography. The film was Fuji 200, purchased in Kathmandu, Nepal. I scanned the negatives on a Plustek 7600i 35mm film scanner using SilverFast Ai software.

Update January 2018

A retired rocket scientist, Mr. C.E. Juran wrote to me. He worked at the site, which was then run by Grand Central Rocket, from 1956 to 1966. He confirmed that Lockheed left a mess when it closed the site in 1974. Recall, in that era, there was minimal environmental awareness. The photograph shows Mr. Juran with a rocket being assembled; the propellant "grain" is suspended above the pressure case.

Update July 2022

A short commemoration of Mentone's 135th birthday in the Redlands Community News summarized the history of the rocket fuel facility.