Kittens, with summer well under way, Acadia still in the city, and this week’s anniversary of the opening of the historic Coney Island Cyclone in 1927, I thought this would be the perfect time to share a few vintage summer scenes of New York City. And since nothing evokes summer quite like a good carnival, why not start with this classic news reel of 1940’s Coney Island?
Rides! Sideshow attractions! Food! And, even at the beach, people decked out in the classically stylish attire of the 1940’s, from fashionable frocks to glorious summer hats. Check out the gallery below for more vintage Coney Island pictures, and while we’re at it, I’ve added a few photos from the 870,000 recently released by the New York City’s Municipal Archives, dating all the way back to New York City in the mid-1880s. Enjoy this sweet, fleeting taste of summer in the city while you can, darlings. Halloween is barely 126 days away!
View a collection of rare 1939 color photos of summer in New York City via New York Daily News, or go here for the complete New York City Municipal Archives Online Gallery. For more historic photos of Coney Island, visit Brooklyn Atlantic and the Coney Island collection of the Library of Congress’s Flickr Commons Project.
Related Posts:
– In the City That Never Sleeps: New York, New York
– All the Cheap Thrill Seekers: Glamorous Bearded Lady Makeup
– Bury the Carnival: 50 Eerie Photos of Abandoned Amusement Parks
Categories: History (Haunted and Otherwise)
Dancing Skeletons and Troublesome Heads: Joyously Macabre Films of the 1890s 
In a Smile of Peculiar Meaning: Edgar Allan Poe’s “Berenice” 
It Is the Hour of Departure: Turn-of-the-Century Ghost Rides 
20th Century Glamour Ghoul: Honoring Maila Nurmi’s Vampira 
The Year of Halloween 
I played Tom Waits “Coney Island Baby” to the video.
And that’s why we love you, darling.
🙂
Weird I’ve lived in Manhattan almost all my life but Coney Island’s at the farthest end of New York City, so I’ve only been to it once. I gotta get to that Mermaid Parade!
NYC is amazing in that it’s technically so small, but the outer points can seem like another planet, and a million miles away.
I could look at those old Municipal Archives photos all day. My dad has told me stories about when he was a kid in the 40s and 50s and he used to go to Coney Island. It must have been fun back then. When I went, back in the early 2000s, it was just…sad.
I’m so thrilled that places like the Library of Congress and the Municipal Archives have digitized their collections and made them available to the public. Now I can pore over all the old photos without being accused of haunting the stacks. 🙂