Coney Island

The phone rings at the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce, and 86-year-old Matt Kennedy answers a common question: “Yes, of course Coney Island still exists. Yes, it’s bigger and better than ever. Thank you.”

Kennedy is one of many longtime Coney Island employees whom producer David Isay interviewed for this audio portrait of Brooklyn’s famous shoreline amusement park. Many of Coney Island’s institutions are still around, even if Coney Island’s hey-day has passed: Philip’s Candies (founded in 1907), Nathan’s Famous Hotdogs, and the legendary Cyclone roller-coaster.

According to the Cyclone’s devoted repairman Walter Williams, Coney Island — and the Cyclone in particular — are here to stay. “The Cyclone will stand forever. It will be here as long as peoples is here. And as long as peoples is here, I feel though that the world will be here and as the world is here I think the Cyclone will be here too . . . as long as it has someone to take care of it as I do.”

Recorded in Coney Island, New York. Premiered August 19, 1990, on All Things Considered.

Matt Kennedy

I first met Matt Kennedy in June, 1990, when I was producing a feature about Coney Island for Weekend All Things Considered. The piece profiled three vestiges of old Coney Island: the maintenance man for the great Cyclone roller coaster, the owner of Coney Island’s last remaining candy store, and two waiters (both named Sol) who’d worked at Nathan’s Hot Dogs for forty years. I enlisted Matt Kennedy, who’d been with the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce since 1924, as my narrator.

Matt was a trouper. We wrote and recorded his narration in his small office on Surf Avenue and had to take and re-take his lines because of the subways rumbling past on the elevated tracks outside his window. It didn’t faze him a bit. As president of Coney Island’s Chamber of Commerce, Matt Kennedy knows a good challenge. In his lifetime he’s seen Coney Island transformed from the world’s pleasure palace, boasting three of the most spectacular amusement parks ever built (Steeplechase Park, Luna Park, and Dreamland), to a six-block strip of worn amusements in a crime-ridden neighborhood of poorly maintained housing developments and welfare hotels. “In my opinion,” Matt declares, “Coney Island is still the most wonderful place in the world!”

— David Isay

Well, my name is Matthew Kennedy, and I’ve lived in Coney Island all my life. My grandfather was Italian. He came over from Genoa just prior to the Civil War, and he kept the lighthouse at Norton’s Point at the very westerly tip of Coney Island during and after the Civil War. The light, of course, was turned by hand so it would face the channel at one time and the bay at another time. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and he practically lived on the beach. My mother was born in that lighthouse in the 1870s, and of course I was born in Coney Island in 1904.

My grandmother — she was born in Russia and came here to escape the Czar — she was the proprietress of a tintype photo gallery in Dreamland. She lived over the photo gallery, and I used to stay with her a great deal. I was just a youngster, but I remember Dreamland quite vividly. I remember Lilliputia — that was a midget city where everything was miniature, and a colony of midgets lived there. I remember the Animal Show, Bostock’s Animals. The lion tamer was a fella named Boniviture, and he had one arm (the other arm was torn off by the lions on a previous occasion). It certainly intrigued us to see him tame the lions and have them jump on pedestals and things of that nature. In fact I was at Dreamland about two weeks before the Dreamland fire in 1911. That’s when this picture was taken — it was my seventh birthday. That’s me in the center. It’s a tintype. I remember the fire very vividly, because my father was the police lieutenant that sounded the alarm at the precinct down here. I remember that Bostock’s animals got loose, and they were running up and down Surf Avenue. They had to shoot two or three lions — they just ran rampant.

It was always a great day to go to Luna Park or Steeplechase. We got in there quite frequently, because my father was the head of the police department, and we had passes. Luna Park had the old chute-the-chutes (the most famous ride in the world, in my opinion), where you went down a long incline in a boat and bounced into the lagoon at the bottom. In the middle of the park they had a building that they set on fire, with people trapped in the third-story window (it was just fictional of course). And they had the pavilion that depicted the Johnstown flood at Johnstown, Pennsylvania: it showed the dam burst and the houses being swept away, all in miniature, in tremendous tanks twenty-five feet across. Then, of course, there was Steeplechase Park. You could go in there and buy a combination ticket with fifty rides on it for fifty cents. The main ride, of course, was the electric horses that went around the circumference of the park. Then, on Surf Avenue they had the “Coal Mine,” which was a dark ride — the two-seater lovers-lane-type operation. We didn’t go in that much, because we couldn’t get the girls to go with us — they knew what they were in for!

At the present time, I’m the executive secretary of the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce. I’ve been associated with the chamber since its founding in 1924, but I didn’t become the director until 1950. It’s a one-man operation, and our job is to furnish tourist-type information to the general public throughout the country. Sometimes people call looking for lost relatives who used to live in Coney Island at the turn of the century. A lot of people call and want to know the temperature of the water. I have fun with some of them. I tell them to wait a minute and I’ll go down and see. Then I go out and take a whiz, and come back and huff and puff — course I never go near the water — and tell them sixty degrees or seventy degrees — and they seem to be satisfied.

I still love the job, especially at this time of life. You’d be surprised how busy it is. ‘Course there’s no comparison to the old days. Today, when people come down to Coney Island they see it through the eyes of a child. They don’t see what we see — the empty lots and the neglect — they just see the lights and the rides and forget what’s around them. I still have high hopes for Coney Island, though. There’s an old tradition of those of us from around here. We say: :When you’re born with sand in your shoes, it remains with you as long as you live.” I guess I’ll always have sand in my shoes.

Director, Coney Island Chamber of Commerce. Brooklyn, NY

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.

Tossing Away the Keys

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola Prison, is a sprawling old plantation on the Mississippi River. It was named, long ago, for the birthplace of the slaves who were brought here to work the land.

Now, Angola holds more than five-thousand prisoners, mostly African Americans. It still has the look of another time: long straight lines of black men march to work along the levees with shovels over their shoulders. They are trailed by guards on horseback, shotguns resting in their laps.

It used to be that a life sentence in Louisiana meant a maximum of ten years and six months behind bars. But, in the 1970s, the state’s politicians changed the definition. A life sentence in Louisiana now means just that. Unless they’re pardoned by the Governor, inmates today know they will never again see the outside world — that they will die inside Angola prison. Tossing Away the Keys is their story.

Recorded in Angola, Louisiana. Premiered April 29, 1990, on Weekend All Things Considered.

Update on Tossing Away the Keys

After the broadcast of Tossing Away the Keys, some of the prisoners profiled in the documentary were released from Angola.

Moreese Bickham, who spent 14 years on death row, was released from Angola in January 1996 after the Governor of Louisiana commuted his sentence to 75 years.He spends his days fishing near his home in Kalamath Falls, Oregon. In December, 2002 he lost his wife of 65 years, Ernestine.
Joe White was released from Angola in 1992, graduated from community college in Los Angeles, and is launching a career as a poet. He recorded an audio update for Sound Portraits in 1999.
Wilbert Rideau was granted freedom on January 9, 2005, after 44 years behind bars.
Ron Wikberg, associate editor of The Angolite, was released from Angola in 1994 and moved to Maryland to marry Kay Smith. He died of cancer shortly thereafter.
Donald Buffet died at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
Henry Patterson died at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
Monroe Green died on October 10th, 2004 at the Earl K. Long Medical Center in Baton Rouge after a 39-year confinement. He was buried in his hometown, where the funeral service was attended by dozens of family member and friends.

Dan Field, Marriage Broker

For more than seventy years, Field’s Exclusive Service in midtown Manhattan has been arranging marriages for people of all ages, professions, and religions. According to Dan Field, who now runs the business, it all started in Russia with his grandfather, the Rabbi Joseph Field, who had a knack for matchmaking. When the family immigrated to New York in 1917, Rabbi Field decided to turn his gift into a business: Field’s Exclusive Service. He gave it the no-nonsense slogan, “I Can Arrange.”

In 1930, Rabbi Field retired and passed the business on to Dan’s uncle Irving Field (author of the matchmaking opus How to Marry and Find Love and Happiness). Dan Field took over in the ’60s. Since then, he has arranged thousands of marriages.

“I work seven days a week, eighty hours a week. No gimmicks, no nothing — the real old-fashioned way!” Field explains. “I have more than eighty thousand people to choose from — from sixteen to eighty-five. I have all walks of life, all over the world. All religion, all race. I have poor ones, I have rich ones. I have high society, millionaires, models, actors, actresses. I have high class, I have medium. It’s a department store in here. Whoever comes in here, they give me an order, I deliver!”

Recorded in New York City. Premiered February 11, 1990, on Weekend All Things Considered.

Remembering Stonewall

On Friday, June 27, 1969, eight officers from the public morals section of the first division New York City Police Department pulled up in front of the Stonewall Inn, one of the city’s largest and most popular gay bars.

At the time, the vice squad routinely raided gay bars. Patrons always complied with the police, frightened by the prospect of being identified in the newspaper. But this particular Friday night was different. It sparked a revolution, and a hidden subculture was transformed into a vibrant political movement. What began with a drag queen clobbering her arresting officer soon escalated into a full-fledged riot, and modern gay activism was born.

This documentary, broadcast on the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, is the first documentary — in any medium — about the riots. It weaves together the perspectives of the participants, from Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, who marshaled the raid, to Sylvia Rivera, one of the drag queens who battled most fiercely that night. The revolutionary impact of the riot is better understood by looking at life for gay men and lesbians in the era before Stonewall, seen through the eyes of people like Bruce Merrow and Geanne Harwood, a gay couple who have been together for 60 years, and Jheri Faire, an 80-year-old lesbian. Remembering Stonewall also examines how Stonewall affected gay politics through the voices of people like Randy Wicker, the first openly gay person to appear on television and radio; Joan Nestle, founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives; and yippie leader Jim Fouratt, who helped found the Gay Liberation Front on the third night of the Stonewall Riots.

Premiered July 1, 1989, on Weekend All Things Considered.

Update on Remembering Stonewall

Sylvia Rivera, a drag queen who led the charge at the Stonewall Riots when she was 17, sent in the following update on July 4, 2001:

Since May, I’ve been the food director at the Metropolitan Community Church food pantry. My girlfriend Julia is my assistant and my computer person (because I still don’t know a damn thing about these new modern contraptions of yours!). We have also been rather busy with the resurrection of Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries and are planning protests around the trail of Amanda Milan’s assassins. So between the jobs and politics, you know how frantic it is. One of our main goals right now is to destroy the Human Rights Campaign, because I’m tired of sitting on the back of the bumper. It’s not even the back of the bus anymore — it’s the back of the bumper. The bitch on wheels is back.

Revolutionary love,
Sylvia Rivera