you may be living in hell
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Over the weekend, my friend Matt and I biked out to Point Lookout, the easternmost point of Long Beach Barrier Island. We cruised down the streets and boardwalks as the sky went from blue to gray. We rode past Atlantic Beach, where boys in orange stood beneath an awning stamped with SunnYAtlanticBeachClub in comic sans. We rode past a planter painted into a kitschy 9/11 memorial, past streets named after U.S. states, past imported palm trees and beachside pools. To our right, container ships floated in the offing. To our left, airplanes hung in the air around JFK, enormous and cruciform. One descending plane looked like it was frozen in midair, like it was about to fall from the sky.
At the island’s end, a banner flapped against chainlink fence. The governor’s name, an official seal, the words POINT LOOKOUT SHORELINE STABILIZATION, a gray field of sand. The project, begun under the previous administration, seeks to fix a revetment along Jones Inlet that was damaged by Hurricane Sandy. According to official documents, “Until the revetment is repaired, houses along Mineola Avenue adjacent to the Point Lookout Beach District Park will be vulnerable to damage from waves and surge generated by coastal storms.”
We ate lunch and drank margaritas at a beachside bar that had a dinghy on the roof, a large plastic shark, a place for boats to fuel up with gas. We biked back along Lido Boulevard and waited for the A train while Matt looked up Point Lookout online. Apparently the community was developed by William H. Reynolds, a New York senator and developer responsible for much of Prospect Heights, several theaters, the Jamaica Race Track, and the Dreamland amusement park.
Dreamland, built in 1904 to rival Coney Island’s Luna Park, featured all sorts of spectacles. There was the Baby Incubator, where Dr. Martin Couney displayed his novel treatment of premature babies. Lilliputia, popularly known as Midget City, where 300 little people lived in a half-scale replica of Nuremberg, Germany. Creation, a biblical boat ride about the book of Genesis that had premiered at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition the previous year. Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Show, Freak Street, Battle of Submarines, Revels of Japan, The End of the World, and so on. An all-American mix of freak shows and bible tales, industry and orientalism.
Across the way from Creation stood Hell Gate. For ten cents, visitors could pass beneath an enormous figure of Satan and ride a boat down into the heart of a whirlpool. After disappearing from view, they would float through tunnels before being deposited safely on the other side.
In the early hours of May 27, 1911, a fire broke out in the Hell Gate rafters and spread to the rest of the park. The babies in the Incubator were whisked away to safety, and there were no human casualties. But the entire park burned to the ground. Hundreds were out of work. Seventy-nine animals perished. According to the Brooklyn Daily Times,
a big lion was chased by policemen, who emptied their revolvers into him without reaching a vital spot and then finally split his head open with an axe after he took refuge in a long chute. A big baboon, his coat on fire and enraged beyond endurance, was killed as he rose to his feet and turned to give battle to firemen who were trying to save him.
The Park had never turned a profit. Reynolds, surveying the fire, said that “The directors of the company will meet on Monday to decide whether or not we will rebuild the park.” They did not.
ben tapeworm