John F. Kasson's Coney Island: A Homogenize

Coney Island: A Homogenizing Beacon Although doubling as a gradual and progressive process, Coney Island, according to author John F. Kasson, helped assimilate a “heterogeneous audience into a cohesive whole” (p. 4). Coney Island’s three famous amusement parks -- of such the country had never had before -- was relished in the heyday of a new urban-industrial society donned in genteel elites and a struggling working class.

In his book, “Amusing The Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century,” Kasson explains that in antebellum America middle-class Protestants of the urban northeast, who were mostly “self-conscious elite of critics, ministers, educators, and reformers” (p. 4), governed by a “strikingly coherent set of values” comparable,

The great park’s creator Olmsted, who “made a central concern of his career how to retain proximity with nature in what was swiftly becoming a nation of cities” (p. 11-12), designed the park in 1858 with Calvert Vaux in hopes to eliminate the “‘social failures:’ the swelling ranks of criminals and prostitutes, of the alcoholic, insane, diseased, and the poor” (p. 11-12), but was futile instead. After the “rural retreat” (p. 12) of Central Park was completed by the predominantly Irish immigrant workforce -- intending for the park to be service to all to escape the urban lifestyle -- few were able to go. Averaging approximately 30,000 visitors a day for a total of 10 million in 1871, the park catered largely to uptown, wealthy inhabitants. The park was too expensive for the non-prosperous classes to travel from downtown, far from their work, to enjoy the

Dreamland Park (p. 82), created in 1904 by businessman William H. Reynolds, sought to attract high-class entertainment showing off elegant architecture. The park struggled to keep up with its counterpart, Lunar Park (p. 57). Dreamland Park although featured primarily freak shows, a new form of entertainment that focused on the strange and unusual, also depicted the high society with its majestic tower and lagoon with imitation gondolas mimicking the “White City” of Chicago -- the location of the World’s Columbian Exposition that “aimed to create a monumental White City, an image of Venice purified and reborn” (p. 18). Dreamland was open from 1904 to 1911. High society latched on to the majestic and elegance of the Venetian Dreamland, as it was depicted in fine art of the time to appear very lavish as well as enchanting by publications like the Cosmopolitan. The working society latched to the freak