"This really isn't a pay-per-ride park."
I wasn't expecting to be in Cincinnati on Sunday morning, in fact I was thinking about going to Cedar Point again. But Saturday had been a late night and Dave Bowers offered me a sofa to snooze on. I took him up on the offer, so Sunday morning after some discussion we decided to head over to Coney Island.
The Coney Island story is fairly well known these days. It was one of America's finest traditional amusement parks, many elements of which were incorporated into Disneyland. One feature that didn't work well with any park was the park's location on the bank of the Ohio River just upstream from Cincinnati. On the low bank of the Ohio River just upstream from Cincinnati. The flooding at Coney Island was a chronic problem. When Taft Broadcasting bought the park in 1969, they had a plan for solving the problem. They bought a few hundred acres along the Little Miami River...and more important along Interstate 71...and built a new park. The new park wasn't Coney Island. Although some rides were moved up from Coney, the new park was something totally new. But Coney Island was, as much as possible, totally destroyed. Buildings were bulldozed, coasters were demolished, and when Kings Island opened in 1971, Coney Island had been deliberately killed. Only the Sunlite Pool, about half of the Moonlite Gardens ballroom, and a few other buildings remained. Taft retained ownership of Coney Island, and eventually opened the picnic grove and the swimming pool, but that was it.
A few ownership revisions (though I don't think the park has been sold since 1969) later, the park is now operated by the oddly-named Park River West. What has changed is that The Company Formerly Known as Taft Broadcasting doesn't own Kings Island anymore. And so Coney Island has awakened once more, most obviously through the installation of the Python, an SDC Galaxi roller coaster, a few years ago.
When we arrived at the park, the midway was just beginning to open and the swimming pool was already jammed with people. Our first stop was the ticket booth, where for $8.50 we received our ride passes. Tickets, I noticed, are $0.50 each, meaning the ride pass was equivalent to 17 tickets. "Our magic number is 17," I told Dave. Later it occurred to me that it really should be 27, so as to recoup the $5 parking fee.
The Python wasn't quite ready to go yet, so we rode the Flying Bobs first...two rides, six tickets. Coney Island does something odd on several of their rides, specifically on the Flying Bobs and on the Trabant where a full cycle involves running the ride in both directions. They run the ride in one direction for one cycle, then reload and run it the other way for a second cycle. The Flying Bobs seemed slow to me, and I noticed it seemed smoother when it was running backward.
By this time the coaster had opened, so we squeezed into the front seat. It's a Galaxi, meaning it is the same as the Serpent steel coaster at LeSourdsville Lake. It has an interesting set of cars on it, though, which have a long, low profile and apparently a long wheelbase. What I noticed is that the Python is a brutal little ride even for a Galaxi, as it slams through the bottoms of the drops. I wonder if the cars are a bit longer than the ride was designed for. I did notice that the back seats of both 2-car trains was deliberately closed off, that is, after opening the lap bars in the unload station the crew would re-lock the back seat bar before shuttling the train down to the load station. For a later ride I got a ride that was slightly less violent wen I sat in the front of the second car and Dave sat up front. Was it because the train was better balanced? Or just because I was now in the middle of the train. Four tickets for the Python, eight tickets for two rides. We proceeded deeper into the hot, desolate park.
The Round-Up looks to be in need of some serious work, so we opted not to ride, but we did take a couple of spins (one in each direction) on the Trabant, the equivalent of six more tickets, and three ticket-equivalents for the Tilt-A-Whirl. On down the midway, Dave asked about riding the New-for-2003 Frog Hopper, and learned of its 13-year age limit. It's been installed next to the carousel in a space formerly occupied by the Spin-A-Ree, which has been moved to a new spot closer to Lake Como. Which is, of course, where we rode the Tempest. Three tickets for a ride took us past the break-even point on our wristbands (by this time we hadn't yet taken that second Python ride). The Tempest is an interesting ride, I believe from Watkins. There is a single boom sitting on a fairly steep angle which provides the main rotation. Attached to each end is a shorter boom which rotates relative to the main boom. As the end of each secondary boom is a large octagonal tub which can seat seven riders (the eighth side is a door) and is free to turn. We were the only riders on this cycle, and Dave and I are of similar weights, differing by only about 2 stone [Footnote 1] between us. So by sitting at diametrically opposite positions in the tub we balanced the tub. Unbalanced, the tub will tend to rotate until the heavy side is to the outside of the combined rotation and stay there. Balanced, a very strange thing happens. As the ride is picking up speed, the tub will rotate at exactly the same rate as the boom rotation, so that as the booms go around, the tub stays in the same position relative to the ground. Which is a pretty odd sensation to begin with. Once the ride is up to full speed, the tub will slowly rotate relative to the booms. As the ride finishes, the booms slow down while the tub doesn't, resulting in truly wild spinning action until the operator stomps on the foot pedal right outside the tub to bring it to a final stop. Oh, something particularly interesting about this ride is the primary control on the top of the operator control console: It's a gigantic red mushroom-shaped button...marked "RUN". Knowing that such buttons ae normally employed for emergency stop purposes, Dave asked whether the "...like hell" was implied.
There are two major centers of business for Coney Island these days, neither of which is the amusement ride midway. One is, of course, the enormous swimming pool and adjacent water slides. The other is the spacious picnic grove, with its shelters named after old Coney Island attractions, and a giant cooking facility in the middle of the grove. They're set up to feed several armies all at once, something they didn't need to do today. At the back of the picnic grove, right up the hill from the back gate where the boat landing used to be, is a gigantic 'thermometer' indicating the flood levels reached by the Ohio River at its nastiest. I believe the most recent indications were for the 1997 flood.
We didn't ride the Scrambler, but with the arrival of a small crowd of people we took a couple of rides on the bumper cars. The cars are little Italian jobs in a portable building. On the side of each car there is a little textured chrome strip with a word printed on it in script starting with the letter "M". From a distance, I couldn't read it, but the combination looked a lot like the decorative design on certain guitar amplifiers, leading me to wonder of these cars go to 11, until I saw that the word is, in fact, "Madrid." It was interesting to watch the locals trying to figure out how to drive bumper cars. One person was certain her car was possessed (in the "Christine" sense, I think). I, of course, took advantage of the situation, using the combination of my superior bumper-car driving skills and my considerable mass to throw the fast, lightweight car around the arena and to do fearsome things to the other drivers. The Coney Island bumper cars don't look like much, but they're pretty decent. I think the real problem is that most people don't have a good mental model of what is going on under the hood of a bumper car, and thus they don't understand why the car may react not in unpredictable ways (on the contrary, bumper cars can be quite predictable), but in ways that they don't expect. After all, most people don't drive cars with a single front drive wheel capable of rotating not just past 90 degrees, but past 180 degrees!
The park has an open-air arcade which first caught my attention because of the kiddie High-Striker game sitting out by the midway. A gigantic sign proclaimed, "$1 PER POUND". I did some quick figuring and determined that it is easily the most expensive midway game I have ever seen, and noted that for well over $200.00 I would expect a hell of a prize whether I rang the bell or not! Even as a kiddie game, $1 per pound is still pretty expensive!
Looking around the arcade, I noticed a theme. The one machine that looked like a pinball machine was actually a bowling game. Next to it is a bowling-themed redemption-gambling game. Then a whole row of Skee-Ball machines. Then a short-lane string-set bowling alley. I got the impression that ten-pin is a popular sport at Coney Island.
Finally, before taking that last Python ride and heading across town for a late lunch, we stopped in the park's gift shop. Inside, archival photographs of pre-1972 Coney Island line the walls, and a display case in the middle of the room contains more artifacts. Among items for sale (including Charles Jacques' new book about Coney Island which I still haven't bought) are antique brochures from the later years of the 'old' Coney Island. Interesting stuff!
Anyway, we had seen everything we wanted to see, and opted for lunch at a non-park establishment. I took Dave home, then headed for home myself, though I confess I did stop briefly at Kings Island for a quick Flying Scooter ride on my way out of town.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Footnote 1: 1 stone = 14 pounds. [Return to text]
--DCAjr
Back to Trip Reports 2003
