A Coney Island Wheel of Wonder

Bowery Street at West 12th Street, Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York, in 1993 (Gregoire Alessandrini).

The Wonder Wheel in 1941, taken from the same location as the photo at the top of this page (Alfred Palmer, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress).

The original 1920 patent for the Wonder Wheel.

Another photo of the Wonder Wheel from the same location in the 1940s (Image courtesy of the Coney Island History Project).

The Wonder Wheel at its opening in 1920 (photo courtesy of Deno's Wonder Wheel Amusement Park).

There aren't a lot of the original attractions remaining in Coney Island aside from the Wonder Wheel. There's the nearby Coney Island Parachute Drop from the 1930s and, well, not a lot else. So, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission officially designated the Wonder Wheel as a landmark in 1989. It remains a family business as of 2020, its centennial.

Bowery Street at West 12th Street, October 2019 (Google Street View).

As can be seen from a recent view, nothing much has changed through the years. The streets are the same, the Wonder Wheel is still there spinning around, and the usual touristy buildings surround it.

Bowery Street sign at West 12th Street, Coney Island in October 2019 (Google Street View).

2020

Broadway at West 88th Street, NYC, in 1960.

Broadway at West 88th Street, NYC, in 2020 (Google Earth).

Broadway at West 88th Street, NYC, in 2020 (Google Street View).

A ground-level view shows that some things never change. People need drug stores, so Zelnick's Drug Store has given way to a Duane Reade pharmacy (though apparently, it has closed). The 2007 MillionTreesNYC initiative certainly has softened street corners like this, which previously looked like industrial wastelands.

Broadway at West 88th Street, NYC, in 2020 (Google Street View).

One last change that can be seen is that the variety of stores has gone down drastically since 1960. In the 1960 photo, you can see a drug store, a cigar store, what looks like a haberdashery (Bilks), and several other businesses. In 2020, you have the massive Duane Reade, a bank, and an eatery. You literally can find these same businesses on practically every other street corner in NYC these days. The invasion of the chain stores and bank branches has reached epic proportions in Manhattan shows no signs of stopping. 2020

Faded Glory

Beacon Theater on Broadway and West 74th Street, NYC, ca. December 1980.

New York City used to be the home of many monumental movie palaces. Most of them are long since gone, but a few theaters from the grand age of vaudeville in the 1920s and 1930s remain. Let's take a look at one of these grand survivors, the Beacon Theater at 2124 Broadway, NYC.

The Beacon Hotel and Theater not long after its completion in 1928.

The Beacon showing the technicolor "Gold Diggers of Broadway" (1929) during its glory days.

Stars Harvey Keitel and Zina Bethune in Martin Scorcese's "Who's That Knocking At My Door" (1969), with the Beacon Theater looming in the background.

The same view as the one at the top of this page in May 2019 (Google Street View).

The Beacon obviously has been through a lot of incarnations through the years and no doubt has many more to come. Currently, Cablevision, which has been gobbling up New York City showplaces such as the Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden, holds the lease to the Beacon Theater. It has restored the Beacon to a much more presentable appearance that hosts top acts in a variety of entertainment formats. The interior is still majestic, though nothing like the original glamor of the 1920s.

Step Back Into 1896

An 1890s girl feeds her very large tabby.

I'm a fan of old films that have been restored and colorized using the most modern neural network techniques. Here we have some Lumière Brothers films from 1896 that have been processed so they look as if they were taken with Kodak film from the 1980s.
The Lumière brothers filmed ordinary scenes of daily life. They didn't go out looking for train wrecks or anything like that. All they wanted to do was show how this new medium of film could be used. So, they recruited family and friends to make their films. The public quickly became interested, and the Lumière brothers are credited with the first cinema presentation of their work in December 1895.So, what we see here in these 1896 films is not quite the first film the brothers ever made, which would have been in August 1894 (according to the brothers themselves) or March 1895 (according to historians). However, all of this film precedes the birth of Hollywood, which was established around 1911, by 15 years.If you compare these snippets with the very first films, you'll see a great improvement in quality in just a year. The Lumière brothers quickly learned to set up scenes like a modern cinematographer and do close-ups of their subjects. Oh, and in case you're wondering about the films, yes, they are in black-and-white originals. However, a type of color film already was in development when these films were made and the Lumière brothers themselves patented a color photographic process in 1903 and began marketing it in 1907. So, the idea of actual color film from the 1890s is not quite as far-fetched as you might think, though it certainly wouldn't have had the outstanding quality of this sort of processing.