The Demise of Astroland

This past Sunday, Astroland, the world-famous amusement park located on the boardwalk in Coney Island, closed its doors and shut down its rides for the last time, after nearly 50 years. Apparently, the owner of the park and the developer who owns the site were unable to come to an agreement on an extension of the park's lease.

While I've never had much patience for nostalgia, I must admit that this news caused me to take a trip down memory lane. When I was a kid, my family went to Astroland all the time. Probably not as often as I seem to remember (3 times a year), but I'd have to say that we went there at least a dozen times.

I was very surprised to see references to the "3.1 acre" amusement park. To me, the place seemed huge. Then again, I haven't been there since I was a kid, and back then, everything must've seemed enormous.

I've got lots of memories of the place, and I'm not just talking about the rides, like the kiddie cars, motorcycles, helicopters, boats, Tilt-a-Whirl and the rest.

Who can forget when Astroland introduced the Pay-one-Price (PoP) concept, where you paid for admission, and had access to unlimited rides, as opposed to the pay-per-ride system, which had been in place since the Civil War. For my family, this was a radical economic concept, ranking up there with the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank as revolutionary moments in U.S. financial history. Of course, as with other game-changing ideas, there were some initial errors in its application, such as the time I was forced to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl six consecutive times in order to "get our money's worth." Then again, I've always viewed vomiting as the "boring" cells leaving the body.

There was also the time that my brother and I, then about 5 and 10 years old, respectively, went to Astroland with my grandmother. Before we left on the drive back to Queens, she instructed us to go to the bathroom. On the surface, that was a perfectly reasonable idea. Problem is, there seemed to be a miscommunication as to what she meant by "go to the bathroom." I thought she was being literal. She meant the gutter. On Coney Island Avenue. At the corner. On a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the summer. During the Feast of San Gennaro. In a local election year. At least we were able to bargain her down to a side street.

Obviously, not all of my memories of the place are positive, but they're memories nonetheless, indelibly printed on my brain.

Of all of my Astroland memories, there's one I'll never forget. One time, my parents let me try my hand at one of those carnival games. You know the kind, where all you've got to do is defy every known law of physics, and you win some sort of stuffed animal with corndog grease stains on it. To this day, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. It's like I've got some fiscal blind spot when I enter an amusement park. Seriously, if one of these guys offered me a giant Yogi Bear doll for $750, I'd be running around looknig for the nearest ATM. Needless to say, I was having a tough time of it that day in Astroland. For some reason that I can't quite explain, my mother allowed me to continue trying. Perhaps she saw the sad look on my face everytime I missed. Finally, after ensuring that the game operator's kids would all be able to attend college (or mechanic/beautician school), we quit. The guy gave me this tiny, brown, glass-like thing, which looked like an animal of some sort. He said, "here, have a booby prize." I had no idea what a booby prize was, so I was extremely proud of what I had won.

That's why I've always seen amusement parks as training grounds for life. You learn patience (by waiting on line), you learn to overcome your fears, you learn that things are never as scary as they seem and, as the story above indicates, you learn that in life, as long as you keep on trying, there will be some payoff at the end. You also learn not to stare at or make eye contact with someone with a lot of tatoos, but that's another story.

Farewell, Astroland.

(There's no way that place was only 3.1 acres).

--MBB