Brooklyn Back in the Day: Coney Island on July 4, Fifty Years Ago

[AP Photo courtesy of Coney Island History Project]

We return to our Brooklyn Back in the Day series of historic Brooklyn photos with one that is entirely appropriate to July 4. This is a photo from the Coney Island History Project--whose website is worth checking out and whose facility on Surf Avenue under the Cylcone is worth a visit. It shows Coney Island on July 4, 1957, exactly fifty years ago today. Back in the day, of course, Coney could attract up to 1.5 million people on the Fourth. Here's a recollection fromm the Online Journal An American Dreamland:

When I was just a boy my parents would take me to Coney Island for July 4th. This was 1947, a few years after WW II, when the Cyclone roller coaster roared down from the sky, the Wonder Wheel rose in the hot sun and later the great parachute jump spilled its screaming couples 220 feet down to a jolting halt, a few feet from the sprawling boardwalk, the planked wood stretching from the proletarian Brighton Beach to the elegant gated community of Sea Gate. All this life punctuated by disastrous fires and marvelous restoration, shedding its stars, like Durante, Mae West, Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor, into America.

Between them, Nathan’s hot dog stand grew on Surf Avenue to the mother of all fast food joints, with the greatest hot dogs, French fries, fresh fried seafood, roast beef and hot buttered corn you could imagine on working people’s wages, plus a July 4th hot dog eating contest. Is this America or is it just Brooklyn? Or are they one?

Here's another photo below from the 1940s that shows an even more crowded Fourth of July scene: