Doing New York -- day 2

Day Two of our New York visit found us heading, first of all, to the Antiques Garage (at 112 W 25th Street), a long-established fleamarket.

We had researched fleamarkets before we left the UK, and had a list of six different ones, but in the end we just went to this one as raking through piles of old stuff is not really the kids' idea of fun. (Wish we'd gone to the Hell's Kitchen one, apparently the best.)

I was thrilled with the things I bought. A colour chart to add to my collection. I love colour charts SO much!

A children's picture. I like the animals on the frame.

And some little toy watches.

Having just googled the Antiques Garage, I discover that it's venerable and also under threat. Apparently it was the first fleamarket to spring up in Chelsea and was then followed by hundreds more, filling four blocks (four blocks!) with tat-vendors. Imagine that. According to this article, Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag and Greta Garbo once paced the stalls! But soon the Garage will make way for a hotel, which is a great shame.    
     There's a show on American TV, of which I've only seen a short clip, called Oddities. It's a reality show set in a real-life New York fleamarket, Obscura Antiques and Oddities, in the East Village. What I wouldn't give to be able to watch this show!

Oddities window

Well, that was me pretty much done, in terms of buying things in New York. I wasn't so interested in the fancy new stuff.

George Tilyou, who built the Steeplechase at Coney Island, also made the iconic Funny Face

But the best was still to come. We hopped onto the N Train, which took us all the way to Coney Island. Ever since I found this little image online, having no idea what it was, and then found out that it was the Parachute Drop at Coney Island, I've been obsessed with the place.

My little screenprint of the Drop

I've frequently 'visited' Coney Island on Google Earth. Here, for example, is the Coney Island Museum:

The Google car seems to have visited Coney Island on a particularly grim day

I could scarcely believe I was now about to stand on Surf Avenue for real. And on an absolutely beautiful cold bright winter's day.

I'm here, I'm actually here!

We had fixed up to have a guided tour and our guide, Danny McDermott, met us outside the museum. See the bottom of the page on this link for more info, if you're interested. Danny was a lovely chap and although the whole place felt very benign and safe, it was more relaxing to be in someone else's hands and who could show us everything there was to see.

We saw the wooden Cyclone rollercoaster. Did Danny say this was the first rollercoaster in the world?

We saw this beautiful old restaurant where the diners ate under the stars on the roof terrace. For a while the building was resurrected as a rollerskating rink by local entrepreneur Lola Star, but it's closed now. We met Lola Star in her souvenir shop!

lovely Lola

Details of the interior of Lola's shop

Yes, we got the t-shirts. I think Danny was on a one-man mission to boost Coney Island's businesses in the slow season when the rides are shut as he also took us into the sweet store and to Nathan's Famous, the first fast-food outlet In The World, where we all had to have a chilli dog -- the less said about the chilli dog the better... I'm sure Danny said that Eddy Cantor and Jimmy Durante worked here, but I've probably got that wrong. It has a glittering history, if hot dogs can glitter...

We walked along the boardwalk, past the shuttered food outlets.

Then we got the best view ever of the Parachute Drop, shining in the sun.

We went down onto the beach and I picked up a piece of driftwood that I'm going to paint on.

We saw the corner where Scarface got his scar. We went on the pier and saw the fishermen. We saw the place where the Polar Bear Club members run into the sea on icy winters' days. It was all wonderful. I love the happy-sad feeling of rundown pleasure grounds.

Come back tomorrow for candy, pickles and the Empire State Building...

Spiky structure

About a year ago I was looking on the internet for spiky structural images -- pylons, rollercoasters, scaffolding, that sort of thing -- for no other reason than that I like the graphic qualities of lines of steel. I found this little image:

I had no idea what it was of, exactly. It looked like some sort of derelict fairground ride or possibly some sort of drilling rig. Anyway, the reds and yellows against the blue spoke to me very much and I decided to use it as the basis for a screenprint when I did a printing class. This was the result (rather, this was one of the better ones of my beginner's efforts):

The actual size of the print is only about one inch across!
     Then, this summer I went to Paris for the day, with the family, from our main holiday near Le Touquet. As I spent a (rather lonely) year as an au pair in the suburbs of Paris when I was 17 (before I went to uni) and hadn't been back since, all my memories of Paris were rather out of date. My favourite place, in 1979, to lie low and avoid my horrible little French charges was the Centre Pompidou, so I persuaded the family that we should head there on the afternoon of our day trip. By chance, there was a fantastic exhibition on called Dreamlands, about fantasy worlds, in particular the fantasy worlds created by fun fairs such as Coney Island. It was brilliant, and what should I spot, in a big blow-up of an old postcard of Coney Island, but my spiky structure:

Now that I knew what it was and where it was, I was able to gather together lots of images of it. It's called the Parachute Drop and looks as though it must have provided a terrifying experience.

 

Coney Island seems a rather stark, neglected place now. I've done my trick of 'travelling' there via Google Earth. The parachute drop is still there, like a lonely exotic bird in a rundown zoo:

But I feel I could spend months, if not years, doing artwork based on Coney Island and its wonderful, dreamlike structures.

My final encounter with the parachute drop was, again, by chance. It was already up on my pinboard, right in front of my eyes, but I hadn't seen it for what it was. It's in the background of a work by artist David Wojnarowicz called 'Arthur Rimbaud in New York'. It looks like a photomontage, I'm not sure. It's a postcard I bought from the Serpentine ages ago. Why didn't I notice the parachute drop till now? I wasn't looking. The Dreamlands show in Paris made great play of the fascination the Surrealists had for fantasy constructions such as Coney Island. There was old film footage of Andre Breton and cool surrealist friends enjoying the teacup rides and giggling on the waltzers (I hope I'm remembering right -- you get the idea). I envied them the newness of the experience and their capacity for wonder and transport. Me, I'm just scared of fairground rides, but I love to collect images of them.

Detail of Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Coney Island), PPOW Gallery