CONTRIBUTORS
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In the popular contemporary discourse surrounding the initial decades of
Coney Island, however, the threat posed to the park patrons’ abstract humanity
was superseded by the more immediate and legible threat to his nervous well
being and general corporeal integrity. The attendant ironies of a weekend
getaway to Coney Island were not lost on Rollin Lynde Harrt, whose caustic
critique of the amusement park in The Atlantic Monthly in 1907 asks,
what more ludicrous and what more sad than the spectacle of
vast hordes of people rushing to the Oceanside, to escape the
city’s din and crowds and nervous strain, and . . . courting
worse din, denser crowds, and an infinitely more devastating
nervous strain inside an enclosure whence the ocean cannot
possibly be seen? . . . “Never tell me again the Americans are
a nervous people!” They are, though, and yonder amazing
institution proves it. Manhattanit