Coney Island Roller Coaster

RICHARD: Say, when was the last time we were on a roller coaster?
EMILY: Never.
RICHARD: Didn’t we ever go to Coney Island?
EMILY: That must’ve been your other wife.

Coney Island is a neighbourhood of Brooklyn in New York. Originally one of the Outer Barrier Islands, it became a peninsula in the early twentieth century when landfill connected it to Long Island. It became a seaside resort in the mid-nineteenth century, and by the late nineteenth century amusement parks had been built there.

The amusement parks began to decline after World War II, and by the 1950s were confined to a small area. At the time Richard and Emily would have been dating in the 1960s, Coney Island was considered crime-ridden and dangerous, so I don’t think Richard could ever have taken Emily there, and the last amusement park closed there in 1964, not to open again until the next decade. He might have gone there as a child though.

The amusement parks began to be revitalised in the early twenty-first century, and once more has many attractions. The famous roller coaster there is the Coney Island Cyclone, built in 1927, and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. Richard and Emily could have gone on it in 2001-2002 when it was part of Astroland, despite feeling as if Coney Island is something from another era.