Coney Island - Creating a Carnival Atmosphere

The idea I found most interesting about the primary sources in the reader was that the carnival atmosphere is created not by the gaiety of the people but by the structural organization of the park. Frederic Thompson, the architectural genius behind Luna Park, knew that in order for an amusement park to prosper, it had to contain amusing aspects in it for the audience. I had always imagined that the people made the parks, not the other way around.

Thompson notes that the "spirit of gaiety, the carnival spirit, is not spontaneous, except on extraordinary levels" (2). Less than 10 minutes from my house in Essex Junction, Vermont, an annual exposition is held. It contains concerts, shows, rides, food, and animals, as well as much more entertainment for all ages. I know everyone, even if they have been to the fair twenty or thirty times, always looks forward to going once again at the beginning of September. I knew that everyone you enjoyed the event became excited to go, I never thought about how much thought goes into the layout of all the attractions. At one end of the fair there are rides lined up in a U shape, with aisles of games beckoning to passer-bys to come spend money on cheap, worthless prizes, and pay money on expensive tickets for each ride. Toward the middle we have aisles of food, all smelling sweet, delicious, and fattening. Of course the cheapest hot dog around is $3. It's easy to blow off twenty plus dollars in one meal:  homemade lemonade ($5), a bloomin' onion ($4), a Philly cheese steak sandwich ($6), earn of corn smothered in butter ($3), and fried dough ($5). On the far end are the buildings housed with all sorts of venders trying to get the visitors to buy jacuzzis,  furniture, a pool, or maybe new windows. Also, there is a farm animal section where kids of all ages can feed the goats, ride the horses, and sometimes even ride a camel. The main attraction located in the grandstands include tractor pulling and nightly concerts, even bringing teen pop sensation Justin Beiber to Vermont.

Everyone is happy at the fair, just as they were at Coney Island, caught up in the carnival spirit. However, it's not the people that bring the mood to the environment, it's the attractions which create, maintain, and restore the happiness and care-free living which amusement parks deliver. The engineering of all the aspects takes great planning and care to ensure that the way entertainment flows will create the most amusement, helping the park to prosper and attract an even greater mass of participants.

Criticism of Coney Island

As the critics of Coney Island demonstrate, all forms of entertainment will have its controversies. The amusement activity which the majority find fun and exhilarating will always have an opposition calling it dangerous or unacceptable for social behavior. Used to the Victorian era, some of the elder people were probably shocked at the sensuality and lack of morals the park demonstrated. In the words of Edward A. Ross, at Coney Island "masked by their anonymity, people feel free to give rein to the expression of their feelings" (97). Free from the stress of work, people let loose and stop thinking about the consequences of their actions as much, relying on their heart to guide their actions on the spur of the moment. Similarly, I think that the college party scene, in terms of social interactions, on weekends faces the same issues which Coney Island presented: the negative being a loss of inhibitions with the positive being having time to have fun  .

At Coney Island, the skirts became shorter, the boys were in closer contact with the girls, and people were controlled by their emotions. On the weekends at college, the skirts also become shorter, the heels are higher, and, regardless if alcohol is involved or not, people will be a little more wild and rambunctious than normally as form of stress relieving. Both situations allow for reason and logic to be forgotten, actions are driven by emotional desires, sometimes getting the individual in trouble. At amusement parks, after the species of straitjacket that we wear in every-day life is removed at such Saturnalia as Coney Island, the human animal emerges in a not precisely winning guise" (96). James Gibbons Huneker's comment reinforces the observation that the decisions people make which swept away in entertainment aren't always the most moral ones. In college, the alcohol only encourages these decisions which are made in the now without consideration as to the outcome. After 4 shots, maybe that one night stand is looking like the best idea of someones entire life, but they regret it on the walk of shame back to their dorm the next morning. People at Coney Island and at college parties might not feel the same way about their decisions if they removed themselves from the situation and really considered the actions they were about to take. Both situations create an environment where losing inhibitions is accepted and encouraged.

Although people may not have been the happiest with the decisions they made, Coney Island and the social scene at college allows both generations the chance to be free from all the hard labor or work they are subjected to during the week. Coney Island presented a Sunday get away for the middle class family from their strenuous long work week. A time to be in an amusement park removed the workers from the city where the idea of work would still linger. The displacement from where work was and this city created specifically for fun allowed people to become a new person in this new world of lights, rides, and shows. Similarly, at college on a Saturday night, students will forget about any and all of their school work, staying out of the library, the environment associated with school work. The social aspect of parties does encourage illegal underage drinking, but regardless the students are more engaged in who is winning their pong game then about writing their literature paper. The social scene, even if students aren't drinking, removes the people from the stresses of the week and opens up into a world of fun and fun. Both Coney Island and college parties allow the subjects a stress reliever from their hard work during the week.

The question I have about the social changes during the beginning of the 20th century is did the social morals change as a result of the new age entertainment or did the new age entertainment only reflect the growing needs of the people?

Introduction to Coney Island

In a book by Victor Turner titled The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Turner discusses the idea of liminality and communitas in a few of his chapters. Liminality refers to being on the threshold between two states, and communitas is the Spanish word for community, signifying unity and togetherness. Often it is the case when people are in a liminal state, they have a sense of communitas forms, born from their homogeneity of being away from standard social rules. Coney Island, discussed in John F. Kasson's Amusing the Million, was a location at the turn of the nineteenth century which foreshadowed the changes of morals and social interactions which would become more prominent in the 1920s. Coney Island fits into Victor Turner's ideas on liminality and communitas through its necessary escapism from the profane, working world, and through uniting all the visitors, turning socio-economic structures inside out.

Coney Island's amusement parts created a liminal world for the working class Americans of the time, allowing for them to break away from the real world and experience fun and play. A park filled with ride, shows, games, and excitement for all let people fall free from their worries and lose themselves in the entertainment which the island provided them. As the racy and colorful postcards exhibit of the visitors, " in arriving at the resort they crossed a critical threshold, entering a world apart from ordinary life, prevailing social structures and positions" (41). There was no distinction between classes because the people were all dressed similarly, with fashion not daring to give away a hint as to the wearer's background. The park created this atmosphere which removed itself from the city life, and shedding the rules of society within the walls. Dwarfs, distorted bodies, odd talents now became the highlight of the Coney Island world where the people would be mocked for their deformities any where else in the New York City area. The island created a fun, playful world, providing the working class a break on the weekends to allow them to return back to their structured worlds and provide this liminal vacation to make their monotonous work life more bearable.

In this world of liminality, Coney Island creates a sense of communitas among its participants which defies the racial and class tensions seen in the city. By breaking free of reality, the people join together and are bound together in their escape from society. No rules exist; the people create their own social rules in the parks which would be scorned outside anywhere else. In Coney Island the visitors "display a sense of solidarity and mutual pleasure in the release of social restraints" (46). Everyone has broken free of all city ties at the parks and beaches, and are united in their ability to drop their biases and enjoy the company of everyone. Ethnicities intermingle, the upper class interacts with citizens of the lower class, and the outcasts are accepted in this fun-filled society. Amusement and fun unites the people of New York City and abroad in a world which defies socio-economical ties. In this liminal state, Coney Island creates an atmosphere in which the people who support a stronger communitas than the one outside the walls of the park.

Coney Island and other parks and attractions like it brought fun and entertainment into the lives of the middle class workers and stripped the people of their biases and misconceptions of other classes and ethnicities. Men and women could show public displays of affection, the poor were allowed to ride the same rides as the rich, and the shunned citizens of society were suddenly on top of the world. In this liminal threshold on Coney Island, communitas is reached as it is produced no other place outside the walls of Luna Park and Dreamland.

After this first reading in Amusing the Million, one of the questions I have about the entire setting is about why people allowed these breaks in social morals to occur. In today's society, it is a given that amusements parks contain certain attractions, but why is it that these new ideas were accepted by the people? I think reading about some oppositions to the events at Coney Island would be helpful in gaining a more accurate picture of the location.

The Tenants Speak

During the 19th century, the focus on improving the lives of the tenants were laid in improving the designs of the tenement houses. They held competitions to see who could come up with the best design and tried to make changes to improve the health and sanitation of the residents. However, as discussed in class, the root issue of reforming the tenements lay not in the renovation of the buildings themselves but in raising the wages of the tenants.

The entire New York Society was attacking the tenement problem from the wrong angle every single time. They were hoping that instilling change in the buildings people occupied would instill change in the occupants of those buildings. They were working on hygiene and sanitation in schools as children, for when asked what they needed to do to stay healthy they replied "I must keep my skin clean,Wear clean clothes, Breathe pure air, And live in the sunlight." Perhaps cleaner people and a cleaner environment would help the poor people rise from rags to riches and prosper in society, living the American Dream. Last I knew, although cleanliness will make a person appear more presentable to the public, such as when Ragged Dick cleaned up his clothes and washed, it doesn't mean that food will now magically be on the peoples' plates and the rent will suddenly become manageable. Their jobs remain the same, their wages remain the same, and their social and economic status still remains at the bottom.

Reformers like Jacob Riis, had other ideas as to how to eliminate poverty from the city which included renovating or rebuilding the houses in which the people lived. Riis suggests that the three effective ways in dealing with this include "by law, by remodeling and making the most out of the old houses, [and] by building new, model tenements" (Riis, 223). New plumbing would be nice, because without it "you had to go down to the yard, and the toilets were in the yard" (Sigrist). Also, if air and light could reach all corners of rooms, that would provide people with in essence more hope by lightening the atmosphere in the home. However, new innovations and inventions placed in the tenements would increase the cost of the housing and the poor  people whose home's they were supposed to belong to couldn't afford it. Why? Because their occupational wages were too low to support themselves and family.

By making minimum wage a law in the United States, this would increase the amount of money that the poverty stricken people earned, allowing them to afford better housing and giving themselves better quality lives. The poor weren't poor because the tenements made them poor. The poor were poor because their wages made them poor, with tenement housing being the only home they could afford to have. Sanitation in an area where disease spread was inevitable, cleanliness and plumbing in an area where the drinking, washing, and bathroom water were all too close, and education in an area of ignorance would all be beneficial to the poor residents in New York City, however they wouldn't be forward progress in improving their poverty status. The focus of the reformation of the time should have been on the wages of the tenants and not on the tenement buildings themselves. Changing the appearance of a living space won't change the quality of the living space.

My question of the reformation is when did the tenement housing stop? I know some of the buildings are still around and used today, but there aren't a lot of people living in these kinds of conditions in the city today? What happened to the people and the tenements they called home?

Ethnicity in the Tenements

Jacob Riis wrote the book How the Other Half Lives to educate his audience of  middle and upper classmen on the desperate situation of the tenants of the lower, poor class. He wanted to instill a sense of change and inspire action to his readers. However, was Riis really advocating for change for all people of all nationality, race, and ethnicity in the city of New York. Due to racism at the time, ethnicity of the tenement residents would effect whether the people of the city felt the area should be reformed.

Beginning with the Chinese, Riis demonstrates present racism towards this group of citizens in New York City, highlighting their lack of aptitude to change and inability to integrate and Americanize. Riis mentions the Chinese' absence of passion when talking about their conversion to Christianity because "he lacks the handle of a strong faith in something, anything" (77). A lack of faith in religion or in anything which the Americans value in society suggests their inability to be transformed and reformed in any means to be helped out financially and thus socially. Also, their differing morals clash with those of the upper class citizens, who find it baffling that "he was angry" at police interference when a Chinese man was beating up his wife (82). The Chinese' failure to Americanize into society and their seeming lack of passion to anything in American values suggests to the audience that reform effort or help need not be offered to these people because they are essentially helpless. They shouldn't be helped because they don't want to be helped. They would rather stay in the bottom than improve their status, in sense giving the upperclassmen the cold shoulder and ignoring any help the government may have to offer. The Chinese racism of how Riis and his audience portrayed this group would influence whether people would want to put in effort to reform the area.

The Jewish community was seen as very odd and dirty, and whether the ability of the people to integrate into upper levels of society were questioned. The dress of the Jews was "queer" and "outlandish" and the robe didn't just demonstrate or exhibit the religion of the people but "betrayed" the race to passersby on the street (85). The chosen adjectives used by Riis to describe the people of the Jewish community clearly show how they weren't favored by society and thus weren't the priority of the city to come to the aid of. Also, Riis mentions that "typhus fever and small-pox are bred" in the housings of the the Jewish people (88). The upper class citizens were terrified that living closer to these kinds of disease centers would increase their affinity to contract the disease. Why would they want to help the people who only caused huge outbreaks of deadly diseases. While it was more likely the close living quarters were the reason for the high numbers of people who would sub come to typhus and cholera, they people still believed it was these foreigners who brought the sicknesses with them. The oddities of the city and the sickly were not priorities in the push towards reform of the tenements. The discrimination of the Jews would effect whether the people of the city felt the area should be reformed or not.

While Jacob Riis' book was revolutionary in bringing the life in the tenements to light to the literate public, it placed the spot light of reform on certain areas of town more so than others instead of incorporating the entire city as one and looking at the lower class as equal. The negative views of the Chinese and Jews specifically shows how the worth of investing help in these groups doesn't appear as if it will be very high.

The question I have about this topic is on whether Riis himself was actually racist towards certain groups and nationalities or was he only writing what his audience would want to hear. Was he putting down other ethnicities because he believed in the discriminatory words he used or was he trying to appeal to the upper class and feed into their beliefs.

"The Mirror with a Memory"

Jacob Riis' work is said by some to have created some of the most objective photographs  in history to the primitive state of photography as well as the lack of any development of an artistic style in the field. Also, Riis was not using to photographs as his argument but using them as a supplement to his worded claims. The camera had no countless number of settings because just taking the picture was an entire process itself. However, I believe that the innovation of photography created biased photographs of the tenants in Jacob Riis' book How the Other Half Lives.

The expressions of some of the subjects are altered due to their curiosity and admiration of the camera. Riis was one of the first people to travel into the tenements are photograph the residents as they were, meaning that it may well have been the first time those people were getting their picture taken let alone seeing a camera up close. The camera created emotions of uncertainty in the new technology, reflected in the expressions of the people whom he was photographing. In Riis' photograph "Bohemian cigar makers at work in their tenement," the young boy continues his hand work in the picture "although the young boy cannot keep his eyes off the camera" (218). The workers are caught in their environment, however the expressions of the subject, his awe and uncertainty with the invention, adds to a biased tint on the photograph. The obvious interest in the apparatus taking their picture changes the expressions on the subjects' faces, making the photographs free of biases in attempting to catch the tenants in their absolute natural environments.

If Riis was trying to or not, his inclusion or exclusion of photographs and the objects in them creates proclivity. Riis took many many photographs of the tenement housing and its guests, but he could only implement a fraction of them in his finished works. This new technology allowed for the mass production of such pictures. His choosing of which photographs to put in his book is biased because the reader doesn't know what the other hundreds of prints looked like or what those portrayed. Perhaps they were all similar to the ones which appeared in the novel. Maybe a few showed happiness and joy in the expressions of the subjects, indicating that the lower class still held hope and it wasn't the middle class' duty to save the rest of the population in poverty. Also, although Riis attempted to photograph things as they were and show the world the poor life with no strings attached, while taking the photograph, he could only include so much. Whether he focused on a person or their surroundings, this act of changing the field of view created biases based on what the author was and wasn't willing to include in his work. The exclusion and inclusion of various details both in the field of view as well as which prints were used created biases in the work of Riis.

Riis wanted to show readers the lives of the poor without changing any of the environment to bring to readers the truth about the lives of not only the other half, but the lives of the majority of the citizens of the city. He did a very good job at showing the middle and upper class people just how the people living near the Five Points lived. However, no matter how close to the truth Riis wanted to come, he couldn't capture all of it. The modernity of photography created bias photographs in How the Other Half Lives in terms of the subjects' expressions as well as the inclusion and exclusion of certain details.

Introduction to the Tenements

How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis enlightened the higher class citizens on the standard of living that the other half, or more like the other three quarters, of the city lived in. Riis' work was evolutionary due to his inccorporation of photography to support and bring more life to his journalistic writing style. People can disregard words and stories as false exaggerations of the truth, but "if half the country tried to ignore how the other half lived, let them ignore photographs" such as Riis produced for his tale (vii). His first publishings couldn't reprint the pictures he wanted to include, detracting from the reality of the stories which the pictures tell. A drawing, no matter the ability of the artist, will be biased, unable to portray the exact unsanitary, filthy, and wretched living quarters which the people lived in. To get a better sense of the mess which the people of the time lived in, I thought I would compare my dorm room at it's worse to the best of the tenements in order to help myself realize how far the nation has come in terms of living quarters.

My dorm room at it's best:

Compared to average tenement housing:

The first obvious difference between these two photographs is the incorporation of color. True, color film had yet to be invented seeing as the first black and white photograph had only made its newspaper debut in 1873 compared to the publishing of Riis' book in 1890 (vii). However, even if the photograph of the tenement housing had been in color, I doubt the bed sheet would have been a magenta and orange combination, and had there been posters on the wall, they most definitely would have been a poster advocating for vacation and an endless summer.

Dorm life is the first experience I have ever had sharing my sleeping area with another person; at home everyone has their own bedroom with a spare one for guests. In tenement housing, not only are the residents sharing their entire sleeping area with their entire family, but their sleeping space is also their kitchen, their living room and their dining room and their bathroom is the alleyway in the back of their housing building. I can adjust the amount of light which enters the room with the tug of a shade, but in tenement housing "large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation" (5). The people lived in a world of darkness both physically in the dreary depths of their tenement home and mentally in the ignorance of their lack of resources to receive an education. Here my roommate and I are at Stonehill paying around fifteen thousand dollars to room at the school in addition to the rooms we have at home, and the people of the tenements were struggling to provide five cents to afford the space which they called home.

The next thing which caught my eye in comparison of the two photographs was the difference in the messes of my side of the dorm room and the messes found in and around the tenement housing. My mess consists of sweatshirts, books and other articles of clothes I accumulate on my floor during a busy school week. People of the tenement have no such commodities to make any disarray with. Their messes consist of people's garbage strewn about the streets (3), the rubble of old buildings and decaying homes (7), and the dirt which the people wear on their clothes and faces with no means to wash it off (35), symbolizing their poverty status in the city.

A last differing feature between the two rooms is the idea of sanitation and safety. My laundry basket holds my disgusting sweaty clothes which I have worn once and must wash before I wear them again. I don't even know if the tenants even did laundry, let alone how many times they wore an outfit before they deemed it too dirty to go out in public with. However, with dirt as a common accessory, virtually anything would look fashionable at the Five Points. A couple weeks ago there were about ten people in my hallway who got a cold and spread the germs due to the closeness of the living quarters. Everyone took some NyQuil and recovered in a week. In the tenement housing, someone might get cholera and pass it on to others due to close living quarters. One of the children from each family might die, and everyone would hope that they wouldn't get it. If you open my dorm door, directly to the right is the fire exit, which sets off an alarm if anyone pushes it open. In the tenement housing, while trying to rescue residents of a building "the firemen had to look twice before they could find the opening that passes for a thoroughfare; a stout man would never venture in" (36). The owners were more interested in the profits of the business than the safety of those who provided their income. Luckily for me, Stonehill College is more concerned with my safety than the amount of occupants they can place in O'hara Hall.

The question I still have about the tenement housing is how was this problem fixed? I know that reforms were taken to improve specific aspects such as lighting and sanitation, but hos was tenement housing eliminated and better lives established for the majority of the citizens of New York City?