Appendix A
Parks and Wreck: Amusement and Anxiety at
Turn-of-the-Century Coney Island
This article was originally published in Popular Culture Review 18,
no. 2 (Summer 2007). When originally published, the author's name
was misspelled several times throughout that issue. The correct
spelling is “Chris Kamerbeek. ” We reprint the article here with our
apologies to Mr. Kamerbeek.
In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, it occurred to a number of members of
the medical and social scientific communities, as well as urban planners and
entrepreneurs, that Americans weren’t having enough fun. In 1869, the
neurologist George Miller Beard diagnosed the culture at large with what he
called neurasthenia or nervous exhaustion, a condition brought on by the body’s
inability to accommodate the accelerated pace of modem life. Beard posited a
sort of nervous economy in which the demands of daily industrial life were
depleting the over-stimulated and over-stressed neurasthenic’s finite reserve of
nervous energy. With the urban industrial environment thus pathologized,
recreational spaces became sites for the rehabilitation of the ene