.bye bye summer.

Summer doesn’t formally end for another five days, but there are signs aplenty that autumn is already upon us – stuffed backpacks on crowded subways, daily countdowns to the MLB playoffs, a sleepy sun that wakes up a little later each day, sartorially dissonant ladies with jackets and scarves on top and pedicured, be-thonged toes on the bottom. Pretty soon the leaves will start to change color, the jackets will get heavier, and the interminable wait for spring training will begin anew. I can’t say that I mind much – an astrological Libra through and through, I live for the briskly temperamental in-between seasons of autumn and spring. Summer makes me sweat and expose more of my raw chicken-colored skin* to the world than I care to and winter gifts me with perpetual hat hair and ashy, dry skin. 

Still, summer in NYC does bring with it some magical moments: street fairs, zeppoles, outdoor concerts, piraguas and Italian icies, Macy's 4th of July fireworks, the orgasmic moment of getting on a chilly subway car after idling for 30 minutes on the 34th street station platform.

But nothing in the New York summertime is quite as magical  – baroque - fascinating – as the Coney Island boardwalk.

For city kids like me who grew up in the projects and didn’t discover Six Flags Great Adventure, Rye Playland or Dorney Park until  a summer camp took us there or our families acquired a car, Coney Island was the jam come summertime. From our apartment building, we could get there in a straight shot on the caterpillar-paced F train, laden down with coolers, home-made sandwiches, bedsheets/picnic blankets, plastic pails and shovels, and  a million siblings and cousins ready to make a day of it at the southern tip of Brooklyn. The water was cold and dirty, and our parents didn't let us go in too far, but for most of us it was the only beach we knew. (Even when we went to the Dominican Republic, my parents were more likely to take us to the river rather than the beach.) We begged for soft-serve ice cream and hot dogs, walking over a boardwalk with unimaginable mysteries below it. (When I was a kid, for reasons unknown, I thought people went under the boardwalk to have sex. And smoke crack. Not necessarily together.)

I continued to visit Coney Island throughout my high school and college years, buying 10-packs of tickets for Astroland and spending entire days shooting at water balloons in failed efforts at winning salt-stiffened and ugly stuffed animals. It took me until my mid-twenties to get up the courage to ride the Cyclone, when - fortified by sand, surf, oysters and many Solo cups of beer - Kim Jong-Illmatic, two friends, and I rode it five times in a row, the ominous clickety-clack thrill of the old cars going up and swooshing down the loops impelling us to ride it again and again. The height of Deno's Wonder Wheel made me nauseous, and I've yet grow a pair sufficiently large enough to get on one of its swinging cars. 

Coney Island is grimy, dingy, past its glory, disorientingly colorful, and totally, thoroughly, eternally, ebulliently New York. I make sure to go at least once per summer.

Two years ago, panicked at the thought that the boardwalk was closing forever (that’s what I get for getting the majority of my news from the New York Post and the Daily News), I took my point-and-shoot camera down to the Coney Island and spent an amazing, solitary afternoon photographing the beachside amusement park/food emporium/dance floor of my childhood.

On this gloomy, low air-pressured bitch of a Wednesday, I spent a lot of time revisiting those photos, saying goobye-so-long-see-you-next-year to summer. (For real this time; I rode the high of my Labor Day weekend for a while.)

 

 

 

 

*I am not writing this for effect; minus the carcinogenic and aging effects of the sun, my skin color exactly matches that of a Perdue oven-roaster. Trust.

© Chommo, 2009.