Attributed to Thomas Hudson (British, 1701-1779), Mrs. John Wendt, circa 1745. Oil on canvas, 50 1/4 x 39 7/8 in. (127.6 x 101.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Kaywin W. Smith Lehman, 79.290.

While these galleries display works of vast diversity in terms of date, medium, style, and cultural origin, the featured artists have generally always worked in the Americas. We’re making an exception to include this British painting in the gallery devoted to the colonial experience, where it will join objects made in North and South America. From an historical and aesthetic standpoint, this addition makes a lot of sense. Anglo-Americans who settled in the British colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries frequently looked to the mother country for artistic inspiration. When elite patrons commissioned a portrait, they wanted to emulate the latest styles in London as a sign of their cultural refinement. And, during the mid-eighteenth century, Thomas Hudson was one of the most sought out portraitists by London’s high society. The portrait of Mrs. John Wendt is typical of Hudson’s manner in which he combines the grandeur of earlier Baroque images of royals, with the soft, pastel colors favored by the current Rococo style. Such portrait trends traveled across the Atlantic in several ways: by English-trained artists working in the colonies, by Americans traveling overseas, and by printed reproductions of works of art imported from abroad.

View of American Identities galleries with, from left to right: Robert Feke (American, ca.1707-ca.1752), Portrait of a Woman, 1748, oil on canvas, 49 3/8 x 39 9/16 in. (125.4 x 100.5 cm), Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund and Museum Purchase Fund, 43.229; and William Williams (American, 1727-1791), Deborah Hall, 1766, oil on canvas, 71 3/8 x 46 3/8 in. (181.3 x 117.8 cm), Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 42.45.

For this British “incursion” into the American galleries, Hudson’s work will hang near American-made paintings of the same period, including the stunning portraits of an unidentified woman by native-born Robert Feke and of the Philadelphian Deborah Hall by British immigrant William Williams. Comparing these works, you can see how the American ladies had themselves portrayed in the same manner as their European counterparts—with sumptuous dresses, elegant poses, and stylish accessories (lace, jewelry, and flowers). This grouping speaks to the vibrant nature of globalization in the eighteenth century as people, ideas (such as British portrait conventions), and things (such as the Chinese silks used to clothe such wealthy and fashionable women as these) moved throughout the world. Similar kinds of international cultural exchanges can be seen throughout the American Identities galleries.

Lynn Hyman Butler, American, born 1953. The Girl with a Gun. From the series “Coney Island Kaleidoscope” ca. 1988. Cibachrome color print. sheet: 11 x 13 3/4 in. image: 9 x 13 1/4 in. Gift of Ilford Photo Corporation. 1991.59.6

Lynn Hyman Butler, American, born 1953. The Red Horse. From the series “Coney Island Kaleidoscope” ca. 1989. Cibachrome color print. sheet: 11 x 13 3/4 in. image: 9 x 13 1/4 in. Gift of Ilford Photo Corporation. 1991.59.3

In 1983, the not-for-profit corporation Coney Island USA was created to assist in rejuvenating Coney Island’s amusement life. It developed many of the programs that later generations of visitors recognize, such as the Mermaid Parade, Sideshows by the Seashore, and concerts on the boardwalk. Lynn Butler’s dynamic take on the site in her Coney Island Kaleidoscope series is a document of a gritty and still spectacular Coney Island from this period.

Sunset Over Coney Island, April 2006, Flatbush Gardener (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

In 2006 the owners sold Astroland to a developer who had already assembled a large amount of land in Coney Island’s old amusement area. A short-term lease will allow them to reopen next summer, but it remains unclear whether the developer’s plan for towering hotels, shops, restaurants, movie theaters, and high-tech entertainment will be accepted or rebuffed by city authorities, who proposed their own scheme last fall.

Mermaid Parade Hula Hoopers, drfardook (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

In the past few years, attempts to revitalize Coney Island have increased; KeySpan Park and the new Stillwell Avenue subway station are the most obvious examples. While many agree that rejuvenation is necessary, voices have been raised against the prospect of turning Coney Island into a gentrified enclave for the well-off.

break dance!, ranjit (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

New York City’s creation of a Coney Island Development Corporation in 2003 brought together city officials as well as local business and community leaders. This initiative indicated awareness of the importance of caring for the area’s traditional qualities and of keeping it available to a diverse audience while providing a wide-ranging plan for economic development that would include a year-round amusement district as well as many new residential opportunities. At this moment, it is uncertain what the result of these efforts will be.

Shoot The Live Human, Cormac Phelan (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

The straight-forward composition of Cormac Phelan’s gap between two buildings focuses on the sad remains of a popular game. Of course there is an element of humor, but there is also a disturbing atmosphere of gloom and even sorrow, both in the site’s state of decay and in the references to the game itself: Shoot the Freak. Live Human Targets.

hose play, schveckle (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

schveckle’s creatively and composed snapshot is most probably taken right next to the gap in the previous picture, but here gloom is replaced by summer joy. The wonderful colors, the laughing biker crossing the boardwalk, the girl having a shower, and the onlookers leaning against the railing; nobody seems to be shooting the freak.

Steeplechase Pier, Coney Island, 1938. Sidney Kerner, American, born 1920. Gelatin silver print. Gift of the artist. 1995.128.1

The depression years in the 1930s were difficult everywhere and this was the first time Coney Island really suffered a downturn, as a reduced disposable income made people less prone to spend money on entertainment. Enjoying the free beach and boardwalk promenades, the crowds still arrived in great numbers, but income from amusement concessions plunged even though many barkers and operators cut prices in half. Luna Park, one of the three original amusement parks, went into bankruptcy in 1933, and when it reopened after a brief closing, the park could only afford to light a fraction of its many bulbs. Many people, even families, used the space beneath the boardwalk as temporary shelter. In an effort to use the camera as a tool to reflect a difficult social climate, Sidney Kerner, a Brooklyn-born photographer, had joined Paul Strand’s and Berenice Abbott’s newly established Photo League in 1937, a year before he took his remarkable picture of a depression era kid on Coney Island.

Coney Island, Depression Girl with Safety Pin, 1938. Sidney Kerner, American, born 1920. Gelatin silver print. Gift of the artist. 1995.128.6

Air View of Coney Island Beach and Boardwalk, Brooklyn, 1946. Ben Ross. Gelatin silver print. Gift of the artist. 1998.34

In the prosperity that followed World War II in America, families found themselves with more money to spend, and Coney experienced a brief moment of renewal, with record crowds in the summer seasons of the late 1940s. But the rise of Coney Island in the postwar years was temporary, and from the 1950s, Coney was in steady decline. Postwar suburbanization, car culture, and the creation of parkways and public state parks such as Jones Beach offered people alternatives for day trips in the summer. Robert Moses, New York City’s powerful Parks Commissioner, objected to the kind of entertainment Coney offered with its penny arcades, shooting galleries, rides, and sideshows.

Out to sea, Marc Arsenault – Wow Cool (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

In 1938 his Parks Department took control of the beach at Coney Island, with efforts to reduce the level of amusements. In the 1950s and 1960s large areas were used for new housing projects built on Moses’s initiative. Widespread gang violence in the 1950s frightened some visitors, and when Steeplechase closed for good in 1964 – a victim of rising crime, neighborhood decline, and competing entertainment – the area dedicated to amusement was dramatically reduced. At this time, a new amusement park, Astroland, had already been established for a few years between Surf Avenue and the boardwalk west of West Tenth Street. This park carried on the Coney tradition during the following decades.

Left: Coney Island, 1969. Stephen Salmieri. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Edward Klein. 82.201.4

Right: Burger Man, urbanshoregirl (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

In the postwar period Coney Island remained an almost obligatory subject for most photographers visiting or living in New York. New and more affordable lightweight cameras allowed photographers to be freer in the exploration of their topic. Brooklyn-born Stephen Salmieri had just graduated from School of Visual Arts when he started his Coney Island series in 1966. Working in the tradition of many mid-20th-century independent photographers (such as Robert Frank and Lisette Model) who found Coney Island an inspiring subject, Salmieri spent the following six years in documenting a decaying area, still full of life. Coney Island as a democratic destination for everyone subsisted, as testified in Salmieri’s images as well as in many of the pictures on Flickr.

Left: Coney Island, 1969. Stephen Salmieri. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Edward Klein. 82.201.39

Right: ballon water, Supercapacity (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

It’s wonderful to be able to juxtapose Salmieri’s photos with these contemporary images, showing that there is still a stretch of concession stands on the Bowery, not much different from the ones in Salmieri’s suite of images from forty years ago. Even though some barkers are now relying on electronic amplification to lure passersby to their games, the original intention remains the same. Look especially at supercapacity’s absolutely stunning rendering of a shooting gallery, an image where the spectacular composition and the play with focus communicate both humor and gravity.

Wonder Wheel, van swearingen

untitled, luluinnyc

For this blog I selected a few really striking images from the Flickr group, some of them showing, even today, that the classic rides from the 1920s are among the most popular subjects to shoot. There were earlier Ferris wheels at Coney, but it is the colorful Wonder Wheel, with its double ring of cars, that has infused visitors’ imagination since 1920. Look particularly at van swearingen’s incredible image of the wheel, with a dramatic and complex composition, and also at the more low-key drama of luluinnyc’s interpretation of the wheel and the surrounding rides.

cyclone, chutney bannister

Today, the only remainder of the three classic roller coasters is the Cyclone from 1927, a New York City Historic Landmark since 1991. The Tornado, from 1926, burned in 1977, and the Thunderbolt, from 1925, was closed in 1983 and demolished in 2000. One photographer in the group, egulvision, captured this sad moment.

Thunderbolt Demo. Nov. 17, 2000, egulvision

The Thunderbolt was the first of the three signature wooden roller coasters of the 1920s. It was built on the Bowery in 1925 on top of the late nineteenth-century Kensington Hotel, and was featured in Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall, where the character Alvy Singer lived under the roller coaster in the former hotel, occupied until the end.

f-coney island 17, penmadison

The 1920s was a prosperous period for Coney Island. In 1920 the subway was extended all the way out, making the trip even faster and cheaper than before. Up to one million visitors a day would come to enjoy the beaches and the amusement parks with higher and faster rides. The subway, like many of the rides and the famous hot dogs at Nathan’s (beautifully captured in pennmadison’s shot), cost five cents, a fact that contributed to the description of Coney as the Nickel Empire.

Coney Island Sunset, Architectural Orphans

The Coney Island beach was made public in 1915 after a long legal battle, and the boardwalk was finally constructed in 1923. Municipal baths replaced the many private establishments, and the city added sand to fight erosion and create more beachfront. At this point the exclusive Seagate had long since separated from the main part of Coney, while the eastern end had gone out of fashion, with the last remaining luxury resorts quickly disappearing. The Oriental Hotel closed in 1916, and Brighton Beach Hotel was razed a few years later. Many Eastern European Jews and Italian and Greek immigrants also took up residence in the neighborhood in this period. By now, Dreamland was long gone, and Luna Park was somewhat declining, but Steeplechase, the first of the three classic amusement parks, was still a popular destination.

Coney Island Parachute Jump, minimal design

Another important landmark, visible in many of the images on Flickr, is the Parachute Jump. Today covered in a coat of red paint, the Parachute Jump is the only remaining sign of Steeplechase Park (which closed in 1964). The steel tower originated as a ride at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and the Tilyou family bought it for Steeplechase in 1941. In the years during and after World War II, riders were hoisted to the top of the tower in a canvas seat attached to a closed parachute. When dropped from the top, only the parachute would slow the descent. Like the Wonder Wheel, the Cyclone, and Childs’ Restaurant, the tower is protected and will remain at Coney Island even after the redevelopment of the area.

Time to rain, balitc 86

The history of Coney Island from the 1890s and through the first decade of the 20th century is very much the history of three successful amusement parks: Steeplechase, Luna Park, and Dreamland. The Tilyou family had been influential in developing Coney Island ever since Peter Tilyou established one of the area’s first hotels and taverns in the 1860s, and the first of the three important parks was also a Tilyou creation. In 1897, Peter’s son George combined the family’s many sprawling concessions around the Bowery and opened Steeplechase Park on the beach between West Sixteenth and West Nineteenth streets. He was inspired by the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and by an earlier enclosed amusement park at Coney, Paul Boyton’s Sea Lion Park. Tilyou charged admission and provided affordable entertainment (a roller coaster, a scenic railroad, a Ferris wheel, a funhouse, a bathing pavilion, food, and dancing) for a mass audience inside an enclosure that was supposed to keep crime and violence outside. The main attraction was a mechanical horserace that gave the park its name and reflected the popularity of horseracing at Coney, at this time the country’s horse-racing capital. (Racetracks had been built at Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay, and Gravesend to serve the wealthy and fashionable clientele in the 1870s and 1880s.) Tilyou rebuilt Steeplechase after a fire in 1907, and many of the rides, from the Earthquake Stairway to the Human Pool Table, were moved indoors to the Pavilion of Fun, a large steel and glass building. The most long-lived and profitable of Coney’s three historical amusement parks, Steeplechase did not close its doors until 1964, and even today, Tilyou’s emblem, the funny face, is considered Coney Island’s mascot.

Frederic Thompson and Elmer Dundy, with experience of running concessions at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and other fairs, had brought their successful simulation of a spaceship ride, “A Trip to the Moon,” to Steeplechase in 1902. Because of the success, they decided, the following year, to open their own amusement venture, Luna Park, on the site of Boyton’s failing Sea Lion Park, on Surf Avenue between West Eighth and West Twelfth streets. Two hundred fifty thousand electric lights turned night into day, with an imaginary architecture of many exotic spires and domes in white, orange, and gold. A two-hundred-foot tower covered in thousands of electric lights which constantly changed colors was Luna Park’s centerpiece and was a fixture of nighttime Coney Island. Luna’s twenty-two acres were dedicated entirely to pleasure and play with concerts, fireworks, and carnivalesque performances, in addition to the many fanciful and creative rides that employed all the technical innovations of the day. The Helter Skelter was a hugely popular, adults-only giant slide. From a fifty-foot tower, people would tumble down the slide on little mats, skirts flying, to the amusement of the masses gathered on the ground. Luna Park also provided otherworldly experiences from far corners of the globe, from gondola rides on the canals of Venice to Eskimo villages, the Swiss Alps, and a Delhi marketplace. Variations of the Tunnels of Love were among the most popular of the early rides in the amusement parks at Coney. Like many other rides, they encouraged informal contact between men and women and provided new opportunities for interaction between young people. We have to remember that when these rides were introduced at the turn of the twentieth century, social etiquette often still made relaxed communication difficult. The Dragon’s Gorge was an enclosed roller coaster, a scenic railroad that brought the passenger on a fantastic trip from the bottom of the sea, through a waterfall, to the North Pole, Africa, the Grand Canyon, and even into Hades, the kingdom of Death, over the river Styx. Two dragons framed the entrance, their eyes glowing with light from globes of green electric light. The ride caught fire in 1944, ultimately leading to the closing of the park two years later.

William H. Reynolds’s Dreamland, constructed in 1904, was the third of the historical amusement parks at Coney Island. In an effort to attract a middle-class audience that otherwise might be deterred by the excesses of Coney, its all-white, more traditional design, in line with the White City of the 1893 Chicago Exposition, signaled purity rather than offering the orientalist exoticism of Luna Park’s imaginary architecture. With biblically inspired spectacles, it was meant to provide an alternative to the evils of dance halls and bars. “Creation,” a moving panorama under a giant blue dome, presented both the creation, according to the book of Genesis, and the end of the world. Its entrance on Surf Avenue was an arched portal supported by an enormous angel with her wings spread out. With taller towers, one million electric lights, and a capacity to accommodate one hundred thousand visitors, Dreamland sought to outshine its neighbors, but never reached the popularity of Luna Park or Steeplechese.

Beside the many different rides, disaster spectacles – both independently operated on Surf Avenue, and at Luna Park and Dreamland – were common at Coney Island. Reenactments of war battles, from Gettysburg to the more contemporary Boer wars, competed for attention with scenes of natural catastrophes such as the Galveston Flood of 1900. Luna Park’s “Fire and Flames” was a popular disaster spectacle in which firemen rescued several hundred actors from a burning six-story hotel, and Dreamland had its own fire-fighting display, “Fighting the Flames,” with even more firemen and actors. Not just spectacles, but real fires were common at Coney Island. Sometimes they engulfed large swaths of the mostly wooden structures in the area: a devastating fire took place on the Bowery in 1903; Steeplechase burned in 1907 (but was completely rebuilt eight months later); Dreamland burned in 1911, never to reopen. With Dreamland gone, many felt that the old Coney Island would soon disappear.

The west end of Coney Island attracted up to five hundred thousand people on weekends and holidays about 1900, and in 1909, perhaps the most successful year ever, about twenty million visitors arrived. Luna Park alone charged thirty-one million admissions between 1903 and 1908. The phenomenon of Coney Island was the epitome of mass culture. Dancing pavilions, concert halls, and restaurants like Stauch’s provided new opportunities for people to meet and contributed to changing the dynamics between the sexes at the turn of the twentieth century. The newly gained recreational time for the working classes was available to most people, and the new forms of mass entertainment and leisure activities created unprecedented possibilities for more informal mingling between the sexes. Public transportation was crucial for the success, and at this time – in addition to multiple ferry and railroad connections – a trolley service was running from Park Row on lower Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge, inaugurated in 1883. This provided another easy and relatively cheap trip for many working-class and immigrant visitors to Coney. The construction of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903 and the Manhattan Bridge in 1909 made the trip even more effortless. The trolley would eventually be replaced by the subway, which was extended to Coney Island in 1920.

Slideshow created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR. Having trouble seeing the slideshow? Photos are also on Flickr.

I am very excited that Patrick Amsellem, curator of photography, is working with us on a web project in conjunction with the Goodbye Coney Island? exhibition he curated in the Luce Visible Storage-Study Center. We have created a Goodbye Coney Island? Flickr group which photographers can join and submit their best photo of Coney Island. From this pool Patrick will select four photos to feature in his posts on our blog throughout the run of the show.

This idea came about because the other day I joined Patrick for a discussion of Goodbye Coney Island? and he spoke about the popularity of Coney Island throughout the years as a subject for both American and International photographers. I am a casual photographer, and his comment reminded me how much I enjoy going to Coney Island to take pictures with my Polaroid, Holga and digital cameras. Every time I am there I see countless other photographers strolling the boardwalk in search of the perfect shot to capture the Coney Island’s essence. What a better way to pay homage to this fabled part of New York, I thought, than to engage some of the photographers in our community in conjunction with this exhibition of more than fifty photographs from the Brooklyn Museum’s holdings that traces its evolution over the past 125 years. We look forward to seeing the photographs everyone will choose to post!

To participate please join the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr:

What is Flickr?

Flickr is a Web site where digital photos can be uploaded for sharing via the Internet. Basic accounts on Flickr are free of charge.

I’ve got a Flickr account. How do I find the Goodbye Coney Island Group?

The Goodbye Coney Island? Group can be found here. Once you join the group (click “Join this Group?” and confirm), you can share your photo by submitting it to the group’s pool.

I’ve joined the group, but how do I add my photo?

Go to your photo’s page, click on “Send to Group,” and then select “Goodbye Coney Island?” from the drop-down list. That’s it! Entries are limited to1 photo per person, so pick your best!

Coney Island has a long history as a place for entertainment. Even before the creation of the three great amusement parks around 1900, the area was enormously popular with visitors looking for fun. The first inn, Coney Island House, was established in the island’s Gravesend section, to the east, in 1829. Guests arrived by stagecoach, and the journey from the city was often grueling and time-consuming. By the 1840s, a daily ferry connection to the western part of the island brought visitors to Coney Island Pavilion, an early pleasure dome offering dancing, dining, and bathing. The eastern edge of the island catered to a middle-class and wealthier audience, but the western part, known as Norton’s Point and the site of present-day Seagate, was closer to Manhattan and attracted a much broader range of people. Excursion boats and ferries were still the most convenient modes of transportation, with just about an hour’s ride from Fulton Ferry or Peck Slip in Manhattan, but the railroad soon became an efficient competitor. With the arrival of the first rail lines in the 1860s, bars, music halls, and entertainment contributed to the grittiness, especially around the terminus, where many small hotels and taverns – Peter Tilyou’s Surf House is an example – opened up. By the late 1870s Coney Island was one of the most visited summer resorts in the United States; an estimated one hundred thousand people visited on the Fourth of July in 1879. It was one of the few resorts that attracted people from all different social and economic backgrounds, including the poor urban working class, which was afforded some leisure time toward the end of the nineteenth century, with a decreased number of working hours and often Saturdays as well as Sundays off.

After establishing Surf House, the Tilyou family in 1882 developed the Bowery, a lane that ran parallel to Coney Island’s main drag, Surf Avenue, between West Tenth and West Sixteenth streets. It was famous for its gambling, dance palaces, concert halls, burlesque theater, and sideshows with snake charmers, jugglers, and acrobats, as well as many independently operated concession stands, arcades, and carousels. From the 1860s through the 1890s, the west end of the island attracted a very mixed crowd, including many prostitutes and criminal gangs, and this part of Coney came to be known as Sodom by the Sea. Nearby attractions such as the Midget’s Palace, a Convention of Curiosities (essentially a “freak show”), a Camera Obscura (where moving images from the surrounding area were projected onto a revolving screen), roller coasters and other thrilling mechanical rides, and spectacular nighttime fireworks contributed to Coney’s immense popularity well before the creation of Steeplechase, Luna Park or Dreamland, the great amusement parks of the turn of the century.

Sea bathing was another important aspect of early entertainment at Coney Island. It started in eighteenth-century Britain as a fashionable upper-class pursuit of health, an extension of the spa experience. Growing in popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially after the seaside became more accessible through public transportation, sea bathing soon became associated with pleasure more than health and spread to the working classes. Mixed bathing was frowned on until the mid-nineteenth century, and although it was acceptable for men and women to swim together at the turn of the twentieth century, they were expected to be more or less fully covered. Bathers were advised to wear woolen or flannel bathing suits, and both men and women were prohibited from exposing the nipples. At this time, public beaches with free access existed only on the far edges of the island. The high-end hotels had their own facilities on the east end while the west side was lined with bathhouses such as Balmer’s. Visitors to the bathhouses paid to use lockers and to get access to the beach, where long ropes attached to poles a hundred feet offshore provided a safer experience in the surf.

As Julian Ralph wrote about Coney in Scribner’s Magazine in July 1896: “It is New York’s resort almost exclusively; our homeopathic sanitarium, our sun-bath and ice-box combined, our extra lung, our private, gigantic fan.”

Slideshow created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR. Having trouble seeing the slideshow? Photos are also on Flickr.

Last week we finished the installation of the small photography show Goodbye Coney Island? in the Luce Alcove on the fifth floor of the Museum. When I was told over the summer that this space would become available, I immediately thought of the discussions on the future of Coney Island and that this could be a great opportunity to revisit the history of the neighborhood and look at the evolution of Coney Island as an entertainment haven over the past 125 years.

Apart from about thirty photographs – in both color and black-and-white – looking at Coney Island from many different perspectives, the exhibition also includes almost thirty prints from the Brooklyn Museum’s great collection of glass plate negatives. Together they cover almost every decade from the 1870s until the present. Glass plate negatives are fragile and to produce high quality digital scans from which a new picture can be printed is a fantastic way to make these images available. They show scenes from the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century and are a wonderful contribution to the exhibition.

Big changes are anticipated in the near future, with proposals for redevelopment presented by the city as well as by private developers. Coney Island was always a contested playground with disputes over land use occurring at every stage of its evolution. Seventeenth-century power grabs by Dutch and English colonialists, late nineteenth-century corruption scandals, firm management by New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses in the mid-twentieth century, and present-day real estate speculations over valuable beachfront property are all part of the history here. In the past few years, structured attempts to rejuvenate the area have increased, signaling an interest in preserving Coney Island’s character and its accessibility for a socially and ethnically diverse audience. At the same time, developers have presented elaborate commercial and residential schemes that many fear would dramatically alter the nature of Coney. I included a question mark after the title, Goodbye Coney Island?, in order to address both the fear that Coney Island will disappear and the uncertainty of what will come out of the renewal efforts. I believe Coney Island will remain, but yet again change guise as a new incarnation takes shape in the next decade.

Slideshow created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR. Having trouble seeing the slideshow? Photos are also on Flickr.

Jook Leung from 360VR came in today to shoot a few panoramas of our Luce Visible Storage area. These should be on our website within a month and I’ll post an update here when they go live. Recently, Jook shot a VR of The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago and we are pretty excited to be able to show off these exhibitions in this dynamic way.

Shown here under construction in 2003 (left) and as it is today (right), Visible Storage, was the second and final phase of the Luce Center for American Art. The space was completed in 2005 and includes 5,000 square feet of visible storage area.

Hand-finished aluminum cabinets (shown here during construction and after completion) contain ceramics, pewter, glass, silver, Tiffany lamps, twentieth-century design objects, and nineteenth-century furniture with original upholstery, as well as a significant number of large- and small-scale bronze and marble sculptures.

Two large, glass-walled bays contain nearly six hundred paintings from the collection, all on oversized, rolling screens.

Using computer kiosks incorporated into the cases, visitors have access to portions of the Museum’s collections database. The database, which includes information on the roughly 2000 objects in the installation, can also be searched on our website.