On the southeastern corner of Long Island, forty-five minutes from Broadway, fronting on the combers that roll in from the Atlantic, stands a weird collection of shacks, steel rails, structures, machinery, booths, towers and lofts, canvas fronts, three-sheeted galleries, plaster palaces, carousels, whirlers, dance halls and giant wheels.

It is known as Coney Island. It lives for four months of the year. In June it wakes to the shuffle of a million feet. Young girls in print and muslin dresses, pinch-faced sheiks with glossy patent leather heads, stout women with many children, stolid laborers in heavy Sunday suits, Jews, Irish, Italians, converge nightly on the Island. The machinery begins to turn, the painted carousel horses start on their never-ending trips to nowhere, the barkers bark, and a million lights turn the strange city of play into a servant girl's dream of Heaven. . . .

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BY EAR—The music is all gargantuan, strident and ugly, as though sung from the throats of vulgar, tipsy giants carousing behind the glittering façades on Surf Avenue and the Bowery. This is the merry-go-round music made of wind and electricity and pipes, akin to the organ and the concertina, first cousin to the calliope.

Nightly the Island plays a gigantic symphony—brash, compelling, discordant, popular songs rasped and torn from machinery, with the ocean for a tympanum and the roller coasters for crescendi, the sharp bells of the concession booths for triangles and the counterpoint of barking and ballyhoo, and impatient auto horns, the snare-drum spattering of cheap rifles in the target galleries and the cymbal clatter of many dishes.

The far-off railroad roar of the roller coasters and the rising shriek as the car pitches down the incline, is the sound-signature of Coney—there is no other like it—a rolling roar, high-pitched voices, the rush of the trucks falling at sixty miles an hour into the abyss and pulling behind them the alarming high notes of semi-hysterical feminine voices. Three carousel organs play at once and the discords blend into a harsh and arresting pattern. There is a heavy, blowsy sigh of steam emitted by mechanisms of the "rides" or "thrills," and a barker for a Waxworks hammers a sheet of brass with a piece of iron pipe. Whenever I hear the brassy tintamarre, the cheap, vulgar music of the island, I think of it as a song issuing coarsely from the toothy, grinning face of the jolly boy of the nineties, which still stands as the trademark of Steeplechase.

OLFACTORY—Coney Island smells like old scenery backstage—paint, papier-mâché and Cain's storehouse. It smells of metal, people, and cheap perfume. . . . The cooking booths send forth their scents—silent aromatic barkers. . . . Popcorn and taffy are warm, cloying smells, that set up an instant craving. . . . Djer Kiss and Violet (pronounce it Vee-o-lay), frankfurters and onions, a whiff of the salty sea, clam chowder and bags of warm peanuts. Do you know the odor of wet bathing suits? Luna smells of candy, Steeplechase of young girls and polished hardwood, the Bowery of cooking corn and Surf Avenue of gasolene. . . .

THE WORLD IN WAX (BETTER MURDERS)—The man with the gray hat on the back of his head sat in the wax Museum, his chair tipped back, resting easily against the rail which separated the curious visitors from the tallow figures of Mrs. Mills and the Rev. Dr. Hall, who lay side by side, fly-specked, very dirty and practically forgotten in the rush of more recent and gooier killings. He was saying—

"You been down to the Eden Wax Works? Unnerstan', I'm not knockin' now, but I'm saying we got a artist. You got a eye for art, I can see that. I want you to go down to the Eden Musee and look at their Vivian Gordon and if you don't come back and tell me I got the best Vivian Gordon on the Island, I'll give it to you. Unnerstan', I'm not knockin' the other guy, but right's right. An' looka Ruth Snyder. Ya ever see such a likeness? Even the expression while the guy's beltin' the old man with the sashweight. Ja look at that? You compare theirs with ours. That's all I say."

The World in Wax has an entrance on the Bowery, a block from Steeplechase. Here Ruth Snyder stands eternally in a raffish peignoir, with a look of quiet satisfaction on her face, while Judd Gray pastes Mr. Snyder with his immortal weapon and the pillow is stained thrillingly with cochineal.

"We freshen up the blood part, I guess, every three weeks," explained the man in the gray hat.

The World in Wax is very proud of its new editor, who keeps up to date. They have put over a considerable scoop on the Eden Musee with the "Capture of Two Gun Crowley," even though it was a sort of rush job, with Two Gun defending the fort with what to these admiring eyes looked suspiciously like a water pistol. This is a much more popular number than the shooting of Arnold Rothstein, which is quite passé and pretty tame anyway. I feel sorry for poor old Doctor Hall and Mrs. Mills stuck off in a corner. No one pays them much attention now. They used to top the bill. . . . You'd think that for old time's sake some one would at least take a dust rag and freshen them up a bit.

STEEPLECHASE AND UNDIES—There is a theatre in Steeplechase that seats about two thousand people. On Saturday and Sunday it is packed. The play is simple and contains two sure-fire elements of dramatic success. It is comic and aphrodisiacal. The players are a rustic and a dwarf, who are the loco tenens, and a steady stream of pleasure seekers, young girls and their escorts unwittingly routed through a series of bewildering doors that lead them on to the stage. Due to the method of lighting, they cannot see the audience out front. As they pass over a bridge, the rustic shouts "Hold your hats." Invariably, they place their hands to their heads. A wind blows up from beneath and wraps their skirts around their necks.

The rustic prods them with his whip, which makes a brief electrical contact and they pass over another blowhole, where again the uprising gusts float their garments. The dwarf pats them gently on the posterior with a slapstick, bestows a solid sock upon their escorts and they exit R.F. over a walk that shimmies and threatens to upset barrels on their heads. In a high tower, overlooking all, sits the deus ex machina, clad, no matter what the time of day, in a dinner coat. His is the finger that summons up the winds at the psychological moment. Red-faced and giggling, the victims seek places in the audience to witness the exposure of the next couples.

In Steeplechase there is a great revolving bowl of polished wood with a hexagonal cone in the center. A crowd gathers around the rim while six girls perch on the cone. A man attired in a red coat and jockey cap pulls a lever and the bowl begins to revolve. As it gathers speed, the girls slip off the cone and fall into the bowl, are flung about and then glued to the whirling rim, some with their dresses about their shoulders, some screaming futilely, and others resting passively, relaxed and helpless, a strange, rapt look on their faces, as they are spun around, ecstatic brides of centrifugal force. . . .

When the machine stops, they all arise, arrange their clothing and teeter to the exit. Sometimes one lies there limp and shapeless. The attendant climbs down into the bowl and holds a small bottle beneath her nose. She sits up with a start, then, arises and leaves without saying a word. The crowd disperses chattering Boy, was she out . . . like a light . . . Ja get a load of the one who couldn't get her skirts down. ... I got a kick outa them two was all tangled up . . . funny how they go for that, aint it?"

The attractions at Steeplechase, the slides, the swings, the rides are based on the permissible premise that people are little children who like to play. In doing so, they furnish amusement for the rest of the crowd, which seems to be a fair enough arrangement. . . .

LUNA—AND LIGHT—Luna is light. In the center of the park rises a white tower picked out in topaze bulbs and jeweled streamers of ruby and emerald incandescents. The rides and concessions, the Razzle Dazzle, the Whip, and the Mile Sky Chaser are outlined in white lights; and viewed from the eminence of the water thrill, the Chutes, it looks like a city of Oz, jeweled, glittering, incredibly beautiful, with its stationary lights, lights that revolve in a stately rhythm, lights that shoot comet-like, colored bulbs in chains and festoons, naked lights that shine hotly and piercingly in front of booths, arresting the passerby. Luna at one's feet somehow makes one exult and want to sing. Night has been defeated.

FREAKS READ TABLOIDS—Between shows in the garish tents with the sawdust floors, while the barkers outside are lining up new gapers, the freaks sit on their platforms and bury their noses in The News and The Mirror. Viola, the fat lady, peruses the daily soothsaying in the former. Egan Twist, whose attraction is his ability to dislocate his limbs, is reading Winchell. The sword swallower is conning box scores. Only the poor microcephalic idiot hides his weak eyes behind blue spectacles, and sits lonesomely on his throne without a paper. Through his tiny, pointed head must whirl stranger things and shapes than were ever caught by type or camera.

YOU CAN'T WIN—"Three for a dime here, knock the kitty off the rack and get a doll. There it goes! Missed it! Two more! Knocked it over but it didn't fall off. Got to knock 'em off... . Try it again sir, three for a dime. . . ." You see, the shelf on which the stuffed kittens stand is broad. You can tip them over but not off.

"Six shots for a quarter here, knock off any package of cigarettes and it's yours, gents. Knocked it over but not off. Try it again." You shoot at the cigarettes with corks spat out of an air rifle. The shelf on which they stand is wide.

You get a cane, a small box of grayish-looking, depressing candy, and, in rare instances, a pink-cheeked kewpie doll whose color runs in the inevitable cloudburst and thunderstorm that explodes over Coney on Sunday evenings. The percentage favors the concessionaire about eighty per cent. When with a magnanimous gesture he hands the little lady a cane it is costing him a cent and a third.

THE WHY AND WHEREFORE—Someone must have thought it all out and dissected homo sapiens, someone who knew him for the sucker he is, and the amusement park was built around the findings. Every ride, every concession, every game rests solidly on a true psychological foundation, and none of them are strictly flattering to the so-called human race. The rides past papier-mâché dragons through black, lightless tunnels provide the opportunity for the preliminary nuzzlings which otherwise are conducted in taxicabs or park benches. In Steeplechase they sell exhibitionism. The horror groups stained with red lead and clad in fly-specked hand-me-downs explain why murders sell papers. The men laugh nervously to show their superiority to shock, but the women stand and pretend that they are thus, happy witnesses to a murder. This desire is born of the appetite for something new to gabble about over back fences. It is called morbid curiosity.

The speed rides sell fear and the promise of young bodies thrown into hard contact with one another, the games of skill and chance touch the passerby on his greed and pride. The things one did as a child are magnified on a giant scale, and somehow the thread of mild pornography has been woven into the pattern. Coney is completely a release from minor adult conventions and gently and insinuatingly an aphrodisiac.

ET ENFIN—There lies Coney Island, loud, vulgar, overdressed, cheap, brassy, brazen, a living lampoon on all our hopes and fears and aspirations, a gigantic caricature of humanity.