Almost everything we know about New York City through popular culture is based in the borough of Manhattan: Times Square, Central Park, the Empire State Building, World Trade Center, 5th Avenue and Harlem. Many visitors to the city see little else. But they are missing the mordant beauty of life in the Brooklyn seaside resort of Coney Island.
A lot of Manhattanites only cross the Brooklyn bridge on the way to JFK airport or for a weekend further out in Long Island. It is a condition that even affects more recent arrivals. Staying just off 1st Avenue on the Upper East Side in an Australian friend's ridiculously expensive apartment, I was granted a bare "aren't you brave - and strange" smile when I told her I was going to satisfy a long-held desire to visit Coney Island.
And I wasn't disappointed. The journey from uptown takes about an hour, but it could be a million miles or, more accurately, a trip back in time. If New York is different from the rest of America - and it is - then Coney Island is vastly different from New York.
In the 1920s Coney Island attracted up to a million visits a day. It hardly gets that now in an entire summer. It was a playground for poor New Yorkers then, close enough for a day trip, far enough away to make it seem like a trip. It must have seemed inordinately glamorous.
But it's far from glam now. Calling it faded grandeur is giving it airs and graces it doesn't seem to want, but it has a beguiling beauty and a million tales to tell. Almost everyone I saw there had a smile on their face, which is more than can be said for the tourists and troubled souls in Times Square. It's still a draw for the urban poor, but now they are more likely to be from areas such as Bedford-Stuyvesant - like the youth club outing that was on the same train as me - rather than uptown neighbourhoods.
There are many theories in unofficial literature as to how the name came about. The most plausible is that it was called after the Indian Konoh (meaning bear) tribe that once inhabited the area. Nobody, however, seems to have considered the possibility that it was named for the Coney Island off the coast of Down.
The well-to-do denizens of that patch of Northern Ireland are far removed from their counterparts in New York's Coney Island though. Thousands of low-income families live in high-rise project housing within a couple of miles of the boardwalk. Crumbled, worn and forgotten, uniform in their drab brownness, the blocks look like prisons without bars.
Historically, the residents were the poor of Eastern European origin, and it's not much different today. Many of the neighbourhood's recent arrivals are Russian Jews who came after the collapse of communism. Several had spent unsatisfying periods in Israel on their way. One woman I spoke to still had a treacle-thick Russian accent, despite having been there almost 30 years. She resolutely defended Coney Island, told me not to believe what people in Manhattan said about it, and said we should see it at the weekend. It was an impassioned sales pitch. But unnecessary. I was already sold on the place.
The first thing that catches your eye when you exit the train station is the famous Nathan's diner, which is right across the road. The Cyclone Rollercoaster is a couple of minutes walk one way and the house under another roller coaster that featured in Woody Allen's Annie Hall is a couple of minutes in the other direction. Everything is so close because the amusements area, which 50 years ago took up a massive 20 blocks, is now a shadow of its former self, a mere three blocks.
The Cyclone first operated on June 26th, 1927. On July 12th, 1988 it joined the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge as an official landmark and historical site. The last sign you see before sitting in the rollercoaster car advises you to "Secure all hats, jewellery and wigs." Not possessing any of the above, I figured I was safe...
I screamed more than any kid. At the first steep incline - 90 feet, from which you hurtle down at 68 mph - I was sure I'd vomit. At the first sharp turn, death seemed imminent. Travel insurance plans and bits of my life passed before me. After it finished, I wanted to get straight back on again. It was maybe the best $4 I'd ever spent. I excitedly asked my girlfriend if she'd gotten a picture of me mid-scream. She had.
It was time for Nathan's. First opened by the eponymous Nathan in 1916, it's famous for its hot dogs. If that doesn't appeal to you, it has every other possible fast food you could want. It's cheap, clean and as good as fast food gets. Best of all, I finally got to find out what knishes are. A traditional Jewish dish, it's basically a ball of mashed potato wrapped in a pasty and baked. It's delicious.
The house under the rollercoaster in Annie Hall really exists. It wasn't a camera trick. And it's still there under the abandoned Thunderbolt on West 15th St. The Thunderbolt was opened in 1925 when George Moran simply built it over a hotel, which preceded it on the site. "Coney Island's newest and fastest scenic railway might be too fast," wrote the New York Times. And the writer was right to worry.
A woman died on it in the first season and after several other accidents it finally closed. Most bizarrely of all, though, it is still used as an office by the developer who bought it in the late 1980s.
The wide boardwalk is made of slatted, dark brown wood and features such delightful stalls as The Two Headed Baby (a ripoff, and not even a good one, but it was only 50 cents for a look), and more cheap and tacky souvenir stalls than you'd have time to visit. I got a T-shirt for $7 and it's better quality than many for which I've paid considerably more.
Coney Island is a wonder and wonderful. Don't go to New York and not see it.