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BROOKLYN, NY Forgotten
"See that alley?" says Kevin Walsh. "That's called Sea Place. But as you can see, it's just about gone." We're standing on the Coney Island boardwalk, on a brilliant autumn day where the bright blue skies and brighter white sands almost make you forget that the amusement parks are shuttered for the winter, and the waters of the Atlantic are even colder than the just-above-frigid temperatures typical for this latitude. Seagulls wheel overhead, giant tankers plow through the sun-drenched waves. Kevin sees none of it; he's looking elsewhere. I follow his gaze, away from the beach and the sparkling ocean beyond, and toward the drab brown housing projects that cluster along Neptune and Surf Avenues. I see a metal fence, I see some scrubby trees, I see what might be an old telephone pole. I see, in short, a vacant lot. If there's an alley there, it's been well-camouflaged. "That thing in there?" I say hesitantly, pointing to what might be a break in the fence. "See where the telephone poles are?" asks Kevin patiently. I peer, I squint, twist my perception 90 degrees. And there it is: a line of telephone poles, running parallel to the boardwalk, overgrown with a thicket of weeds verging on a wilderness. A street all but reclaimed by nature and the neglect of the Department of Transportation: Sea Place. Kevin wants to go down and take a picture of this nondescript wasteland with the Canon point-and-shoot slung around his neck, but first he has something else to show me. Up on the boardwalk, across from a group of long burned-out bungalows that once served beachgoers in the 1930s, is one of dozens of indistinguishable lampposts that line the beach: gray, hulking, utilitarian. Only this one, Kevin explains, has something to differentiate it. "On the pole over there -- you see that little thing that holds the orange fire alarm? It's atypical of the usual ones, because it was removed from an old cast-iron pole, and spliced onto this pole. It's a more ornate design. "This," he says unnecessarily, "is something only I notice." * * * By day, mild-mannered Kevin Walsh works in a back office at Macy's, churning out ad copy for the bedding and housewares departments. It's at night and on weekends that he transforms into his alter ego: proprietor of Forgotten New York, self-appointed archivist of city history that lives on under the noses of its residents. Visitors to the forgotten-ny.com website are greeted with a lengthy scroll of links, alongside a bedlam of images of faded signs, old postcards, oddball buildings in unlikely places. "The past is all around us in New York," announces a splash of introductory text. "This site is your gateway to a New York City that existed long ago -- and still exists in a hidden form today. We'll show you the past in lampposts, advertisements, bridges, buildings, signs, and things you pass every day in the street that bear silent witness to the NYC that once was." A Bronx rock that played a key role in the Revolutionary War, the last working farm in Queens, remnants of a 1904 raceway in Nassau County -- uncounted dozens of pages sporting hundreds of images, with Kevin adding more every week. Ask Kevin how he became perhaps the city's foremost amateur historian, and he tells you about lampposts. "When I was a kid, my mother used to take me for bus rides," he says. "From Bay Ridge we went to Flatbush, to Coney Island. This was around the era, 1962 to 1965, when the city was replacing its entire stock of lampposts. They were changing from the old, ornate cast-iron posts to the new octagonal posts you see today. And for reasons I can't explain, I've always been attracted to lampposts. And I've always paid attention to the ones that are still remaining from the ancient era." The old poles, he discovered, "date as far back as 1892, when the first electric lamp poles were introduced in New York City. Gradually, over the years, this fascination with lampposts developed into a fascination with all old things that are left around in the street that nobody notices anymore." This fascination with old things extends to the streets themselves. One of the most engrossing -- or as the new media types would say, "sticky" -- sections of the Forgotten New York site is the Street Necrology, listing streets, lanes, and alleys that, like Sea Place, have disappeared over the years, leaving only telltale signs of their passing: Cuylers Alley. Bishop's Lane. New Chambers Street. Jacob Street. Amos Street. Rachel Lane. Herring Street. Republican Alley. Kevin's necrology has already catalogued 90 streets, and he's only covered the lower third of Manhattan. (He also has 17 separate pages devoted to lampposts, including such esoterica as "bishop's crooks" and "twin masts.") What isn't to be found here are any odes to the recently restored Grand Central Terminal, or even pages on beloved, now-vanished relics like the Metropolitan Opera House. Forgotten New York is at heart a catalogue of historical debris; to qualify, an artifact must be extant but ultimately worthless. Kevin prefers to consider it giving equal time to the non-celebrities of the historic world: "those structures that perform worthy tasks as well, yet do not have the public attention. Rather like Macy's copywriters." Maybe this is why, when we pass a discarded doll's head lying in the street, Kevin braves the sparse Coney Island traffic to photograph it. It is undoubtedly why, standing alongside the overgrown Sea Place and aiming his point-and-shoot camera into an undifferentiated thicket of weeds, he notes, "This is a real Forgotten New York scene." * * * One of the reasons for this day's excursion, Kevin has e-mailed me, is to document "the Life Savers on the base of the parachute jump." The parachute jump is one of Brooklyn's strangest and most beloved landmarks: a 250-foot-tall steel tower, not unlike Eiffel's until the very top, where it suddenly explodes into a wheel of radiating spokes. From each of the spokes once hung a cable, and from each cable hung a Coney Island thrillseeker, who would be strapped in, hoisted 20 stories up, then dropped in a controlled fall, a fabric "parachute" billowing behind. Built originally for the 1939 World's Fair in Queens (on a design concocted by a retired Navy officer for training of paratroopers), this low-tech bungee precursor was later relocated to Coney Island. There, it became such an integral part of the skyline that when it was closed, along with the surrounding Steeplechase Park in 1964, the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce lobbied to save it. Like Boston's famed Citgo sign beside Fenway Park, the parachute jump is a commercial property that has long enough outlived its usefulness to become a cherished part of the urban streetscape: blessed with city landmark status in 1977 -- and again, just to make sure, in 1988 -- it is now maintained by the city buildings department. We arrive at the parachute jump, which towers over much of the surrounding landscape. Its hulking metal frame stands there, eternal, slightly rusting, between the abandoned Thunderbolt rollercoaster and the Abe Stark recreation center, named in tribute to the man whose "Hit Sign, Win Suit" ad at Ebbets Field so defined Brooklyn that its residents elected him borough president. There are no Life Savers. Kevin is disappointed. "Last time I was here, there was a barrier surrounding it, made of wood. It was the original one that was here when the thing was put here in the 1940s. And on that barrier were some Life Saver‚shaped objects. I was going to photograph them." The Life Saver company, he explains, was the original sponsor of the parachute jump in its World's Fair days. What is present is something that hasn't been seen around Coney Island much in recent decades: new development. Shouldering itself right up against the parachute jump is the steel skeleton of a baseball stadium; in June 2001, a minor-league affiliate of the Mets will begin play here, in a ballpark built with nearly $40 million of city money. The local papers have been full of "Baseball is back in Brooklyn!" announcements, playing off the still-living trauma of the loss of the Dodgers to California. Kevin hopes that with the coming of the ballpark, the parachute jump will be rehabilitated. "I wouldn't ride it," he is quick to add, "but I imagine it would be a very big tourist attraction." Restoring a four-decade-dead ride that would undoubtedly give insurance companies fits is not as unlikely as it might once have seemed. For even as New York embarks on a development boom that is transforming it utterly, the city is simultaneously in the grip of a bumper crop of historical nostalgia. There was Luc Sante's Low Life, which memorialized working-class life on the Lower East Side a century ago, and Caleb Carr's best-selling novel The Alienist, where a gaslight proto-Freudian chased a serial killer through the streets of 1880s Manhattan. Most recently, New York's history has gotten the ultimate tribute: a multipart PBS documentary series by one of the Burns brothers, just like such other American icons as baseball and the Civil War. So far, the wave of gentrification has fallen short of Coney Island, but many believe it's only a matter of time. Some of New York's most "historic" neighborhoods exist only because for years, no one wanted anything to do with them, often because they were targeted for demolition. The Lower Manhattan Expressway planned by city highway builder Robert Moses never materialized (though it lives on in ever-forward-looking maps of the 1960s, its scheduled route marked by a dashed line), but it kept developers from eyeing the old cast-iron loft buildings in its path for replacement. Left untouched, they were eventually discovered by underfed artists desperate for high ceilings and low rents, and South of Houston -- Soho -- was born. "A similar condition existed when they built the World Trade Center," notes Kevin. "A neighborhood north of there that would become Tribeca remained in place for several years. Including its collection of old-time lampposts. That's my latest page." These days, of course, the lofts of Soho and Tribeca have mostly been colonized by the well-heeled, and the artists have fled elsewhere, like Brooklyn's cloyingly named DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). Historical fetishism is a tricky business, however. Actual decay is bad, but seedy charm can be good, and enough elements of the old must be maintained to remind residents why they moved to the city in the first place. Without these nods to authenticity, you have ä "the reconstruction of Times Square?" suggests Kevin. If there's a litmus test for the divisions that rend New Yorkers' opinions of development, Giuliani, yuppies, and a whole host of other local issues, it's Times Square. (Or, as its street signs now unashamedly pronounce it, "The New Times Square.") In the 1980s, developers targeted the city's traditional tourist and theater center for redevelopment. With the help of generous city tax breaks, most of the low-rise buildings in the blocks around Times Square were torn down and replaced by sun-blocking glass-and-steel highrises. Only a few old theaters remained, converted from porn palaces to fashionable first-run houses; one, the Empire, was left intact but hoisted onto rails and shuttled to the other end of the block, to make way for the Disney corporate tower that now stands on its old site. The New Times Square claims plenty of neon, plenty of tourists, and the same chain stores (Virgin Records, ESPN SportsZone) you'd find in any other American entertainment district. "I certainly didn't care for the hellhole it had become," says Kevin. "On the other hand, I would have preferred a more natural redevelopment. It's pure Disney right now. I guess it's good for the economy, but I would like it to revert to the way it was in the Forties or so, when it was somewhat more of a natural progression. Now it's like we've scoured out the shit, we're putting down brand-new prefabricated stuff. It's improvement, but I'm not crazy about it." For Coney Island, it's clear which elements would form the core of any nostalgic retrofitting of the neighborhood. The parachute jump and the Cyclone rollercoaster are landmarked, and so assured of being part of any New Coney Island. Less certain of surviving any sea change are structures like Childs restaurant, an abandoned building dating from the 1890s (Kevin's guess) that faces onto the boardwalk a short hike from the parachute jump. Boarded up and graffitied over till recently, it has been restored somewhat by the present owner, but still stands vacant. Kevin points to the terra cotta work that tops the facade: a mermaid, the god Neptune, a whale. They are beautiful in their arcane detail, the intense blues and browns of the glazes only slightly chipped by the passage of a hundred years. Fish cavort along the low cornice, dancing amid clamshells. We stop to take photos by the Thunderbolt, the old steel-and-wood rollercoaster, now overgrown with ivy but still otherwise intact, that stands at the edge of the field where the new ballpark is going up. Kevin points out the house underneath it where Woody Allen's character grew up in Annie Hall, where the coaster's owner made his residence until recent years, where an American flag still flies. ("Get my profile," insists Kevin as I bring him into focus against the rollercoaster backdrop.) Then it's on to lunch at Nathan's, the ur-hot dog stand that is one of the few storefronts open during the Coney offseason. Beneath a sign reading "Hot Dogs and French Fries Now Served 'Outside,'" Kevin confides that he'd ultimately like to franchise his site: to have a Forgotten Chicago, a Forgotten San Francisco, all linked in a glorious web of beautiful detritus. The only problem, he says, is finding enough people in enough cities with the commitment to take it on. He takes another mouthful of fries, waffle-cut and drenched in oil. "These are the best fast-food french fries you'll find." * * * Six weeks later, I will get a phone message from my friend David: "In case you didn't hear, the Thunderbolt was destroyed at 6 a.m. this morning by the evil troops of Giuliani in bulldozers. So there you go -- another New York landmark, demolished." With no warning to the neighborhood and no notice to the Thunderbolt's owner, city police had swooped in and detained the coaster's lone security guard; they were followed by bulldozers, and within an hour, the demolition had begun. The city claimed that it moved in response to a complaint of unsafe conditions at the coaster, made several months earlier by an anonymous tipster. Locals remain skeptical, noting that the Thunderbolt site would make a convenient parking lot for the new ballpark. (The "anonymous tip," they also note, arrived in suspiciously short order following the mayor's visit to the site for the stadium groundbreaking.) On the website of Coney Island, USA, the not-for-profit that runs the yearly Mermaid Parade and other local attractions, artistic director Dick Zigun speculates, "It seems that some people think of the Thunderbolt as an urban blight eyesore that needs to come down before the minor league baseball stadium opens in June." The Thunderbolt, though, was more than either an eyesore or a nice backdrop to minor-league popups. One of the last six surviving designs of John Miller, the "Thomas Edison of rollercoasters" who singlehandedly invented modern coaster design, the old structure was built in 1925, a year before Miller's more famous Cyclone went up nearby. American Coaster Enthusiasts had identified no fewer than four other amusement parks interested in dismantling the Thunderbolt and relocating it to properties out of town; along with the folklore group CityLore and Coney Island, USA, the coaster group was in the process of filing for city landmark status for the Thunderbolt when the bulldozers arrived. As word spreads of the demolition, people begin arriving by the dozens to look, to photograph, to say their goodbyes. A week later, the twisted wreckage is never without an entourage of mourners and rubberneckers, with a steady stream of cars pulling up, disgorging their silently staring cargo, then driving off. One woman poses for a snapshot, wrapped in police tape left over from demolition day. "We came out here every year," a bewildered woman declares as her car idles nearby. "We never thought that it'd be gone." Her gaze passes over the landscape, the chunks of wood and metal, the parachute jump and the nascent ballpark growing out of the sandy soil beyond. "They say it was falling down. But I think they wanted it for parking for the ballpark." The hurricane fence is down on the boardwalk side of the Thunderbolt lot, and people are clambering over the low railing to wander amidst the wreckage, cameras in tow. The look on their faces is one of curious awe: it was just there last week, wasn't it? The only moving figure without a camera is a man who walks slowly across the entire site, sweeping it with a metal detector. No, he hasn't found anything good yet, he tells a questioner. Some other people, he's heard, found some ninepins. "You don't know what ninepins are? They're like tenpins, only smaller. I don't know what I'd do with them. They'd be kind of a pain in the neck to carry around." He starts off again, the metal detector slowly swinging. "You know how it is: One man's garbage is another man's jewels." * * * Leaving behind the boardwalk and the amusement parks, Kevin and I head inland, toward the site of the tiny community known as White Sands. The back side of Coney Island -- which hasn't been an island for more than a century, almost as long as it's been since the last of the wild rabbits, or coneys, disappeared -- is a wonderland of auto body shops, the kind of low-rent industrial-commercial landscape that most people think of as a needless eyesore until the moment they need their car repaired. We pass by several vintage autos, which attract Kevin's admiration. "I'm going to have a page called Name That Car. I've shot a lot of old cars around the city, and I'm going to ask people to identify them." Standing at curbside, a young man working on a car is decked out in a Teemu Selanne hockey jersey from the Finnish national team. Its gold letters on a rich blue background read "SUOMI." Crossing a small bridge over Coney Island Creek, we arrive at the entrance to White Sands. A large steam shovel stands guard over a rubble-strewn lot; otherwise, there's no one in sight. "Watch out for wild dogs," says Kevin helpfully. White Sands is a barren waste. On the broad dirt plain, only the steam shovel moves, clearing bits of debris that cling to the sandy dirt. When last here a year ago, Kevin recalls, he found and photographed blocks and blocks of modest houses. (According to the Forgotten New York website, "the bungalows were originally built on stilts above white-colored sand, which was eventually removed to fill the Coney Island beach, decimated by a hurricane in 1938.") Now, only a handful survive, perched precariously between the construction site and the neighboring highway. Even on Kevin's first visit, White Sands was already doomed. Home Depot, the big-box home-maintenance store that is rapidly colonizing New York City, decided that here -- on low-rent land a wrench's throw from the Belt Parkway -- was where it would built its next superstore, and made the residents an offer they couldn't refuse for their homes. The people moved out, the bulldozers came in, and White Sands vanished. Only a line of telephone poles remains to mark the remnants of what had been Bay 53rd Street. A sign high on one reads: "10 M.P.H. Private Street. Residents Only." Kevin begins snapping photos. A lone security guard begins tailing us, puzzled and wary. I approach him, and to keep his attention from Kevin and his camera, make small talk about when contruction is due to begin. In Hindi-accented English, he shows me where the main building will go, back there by the remaining ballfields, with the vast parking lots up here in front. We catch up with Kevin near a pile of old tires. "This is the outlet," says the guard, indicating one portion of the endless swath of dirt. "This will be the road area." He points back toward Coney Island Creek, the salt-water estuary that forms the back edge of the White Sands parcel, and that once made Coney an island. "People come go there and fish, every day." "Ah, you can't fish in there," scoffs Kevin. "Any fish you get out of there has four eyes." * * * We head back from the beach on the D train, also known as the Brighton line for its swing past Brighton Beach before ending at the massive Stillwell Avenue station on Coney Island, where four of Brooklyn's subway lines have their terminus. The subway is above-ground here, in an open cut that runs between modest single-family houses and predates them by decades: the right-of-way was first laid out in the 1870s for the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island railroad, to bring visitors from Brooklyn to the distant sands of Coney Island. The railroad's owners -- who also owned the Brighton Beach Hotel conveniently placed at the end of the line -- included political operatives Henry Murphy and William Kingsley, who in their spare time were heading up a project that would ultimately become known as the Brooklyn Bridge. I want to show Kevin my own discovery, a set of three row houses near my apartment that, for reasons of their own, sit midblock at an oblique angle to their neighbors. (I theorize they're a remnant of an otherwise vanished street grid; Kevin will suspect an old alley. Kevin likes to blame old alleys.) This requires walking through the surrounding neighborhood of brownstone row houses and brick apartments, which forms a transition zone between the upscale district of Park Slope and the working-class Caribbean enclave of Crown Heights. I mention that my partner and I had once considered living here; but by the time we had the money, the neighborhood had become too expensive, and we had no time machine to take us back to the days when our current savings might be able to afford a house here. "That's the one thing that I would like to do, but the physics of the universe doesn't accommodate me," says Kevin. "If I had a time machine, I'd put it on my corner, and just go back, one year at a time, and look around. Then I'd come back to the year 2000, and I'd go forward, one year at a time. And I'd just watch the incremental changes." 
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