Michael Mayer - Time Trippers The Nights of the Round Table

I asked the kids if they wanted to go back to the hotel or were they ready for some more fun? They opted for more fun so we hit the subway and headed for Coney Island instead of the movies. It was a long trip in transferring from the IRT to the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit at 14th Street, the trains not too crowded at around 3 pm.

We took a ‘Sea Beach’ express to Coney Island, and worked our way to the front to see down the tunnel in the black steel ‘Standard’ cars, racing through the subway, taking the Manhattan Bridge route, the slow scenic climb looking at the skyline of Wall Street and the nearby Brooklyn Bridge, then into Brooklyn’s complex station at DeKalb Avenue, the slow jog to Pacific Street then the dash on the express tracks to 59th Street and the long climb up to the Sea Beach line in the open-air, concrete-lined ‘cut’ below ground level making the local stops all the way to Coney Island, the crowd thinning, and less formally dressed people getting on.

Coney Island and Luna Park were lit up beyond belief. The kids marveled at the swirling lights, the towers outlined in lights like a magic city. The crowds were in shirtsleeves, straw hats, more of the ordinary people. New York’s ‘summer resort’ for the subway crowd. It was like a fairyland, truly amazing compared to how it looks ‘today’ back in our time. Like a miniature, gaudy Disney World and Six Flags all rolled into one, besides the rides and carnival games, it had theaters, the Eskimo and German Villages, Trip to the North Pole, scenic railways and all kinds of attractions and exhibits. You name it, they had it, it seemed.

There were the magnificent amusement parks and the boardwalk with a real beach, all jammed onto this narrow strip of land. Smells of cotton candy, hot dogs, hamburgers, clams and boiling crab filled the air. The hot dogs were served split in hamburger buns, if you please. Jonathan and Lauren both had a mass of cotton candy.

We hit the rides. The kids did not want to take the Cyclone, the glorious old wooden rollercoaster, so we opted for the amazing ‘steeplechase’ instead. Since the 1890’s you could ride wooden ‘horses’ that straddled a raised track just like a monorail and race 3 other people like a mini-roller coaster. Jonathan took a horse and Lauren and I shared one. We had a great time, the kids whooping it up. It was kind of scary riding those horses, kind of like a train on elevated rails.

There was the ‘Shoot the Chutes’ that had actual sailors guiding the boats down the multiple log chutes. We had the most fun on the barrel roll, inside a rotating barrel, upending and impossible to maintain our dignity, along with a crowd of boys and their dates, turned upside down.

We really had fun on the spinning wheel, where it spins faster and faster until everybody is thrown off in a heap.

After three hours of this we had had it and the kids snoozed on the subway on the way back to the hotel. We took a Brighton line express which was quickest way back without a change of trains, leaving us at Times Square, two short and one long block away. The kids were dead to the world, each with a small stuffed doggie.

Wednesday morning, we visited the Ile De France, which after the Mauretania’s dark, traditional interiors, was jaw-droppingly modern. Nothing remained of a traditional interior, as if the designers were trying something new in every public room. I explained that designers in Europe, like the Bauhaus group in Germany, were on the cutting edge of modern design. Art Deco, keeping things as simple as possible, was quite a radical idea in the ‘20’s.

The kids as well as myself were awestruck at the radical interiors, indirect lighting and woods molded and bent into modern groups of columns. The 1st class dining room was ultra-modern and three stories high in the center, the walls and ceilings covered with rectangles of lights, the decorative fountains of glass and aluminum pipes as modern as anything in the 21st century. The dining room had, of course, the French Line’s traditional grand staircase entrance so any woman could make a grand entrance as if in a palace, the French the most indulgent where women were concerned. There was also the tall barroom that stretched the width of the ship behind the third funnel that looked a lot like the bridge. One of the chief attractions of foreign ships was legal alcohol. The Ile was described as the most popular ship of the ‘20’s.

“Is she the largest ship now?” Jonathan asked.

“No, the largest ships are still the old German ‘Big Three,’ Hamburg-Amerika Line’s three-funneled giants, bigger than Titanic, two of which entered service just before World War I and were in U.S. waters at the outbreak of the war. They were interned, later used as troop ships when the U.S. entered the war in 1917.”

“They were taken by the Allies after the war as compensation for ships lost to German torpedoes. The US kept the Vaterland, renamed Leviathan. (She was irreverently dubbed the ‘Levy Nathan’ by US troops during the war.) She was rebuilt to modern standards and sails as the only large U.S. liner. Thanks to Prohibition though, she isn’t popular. None of them are in the harbor now.”

We ran into the legendary Chief Purser, Henri Villar, in effect the hotel keeper, whose duty was the passenger’s welfare and who, it was said, had an amazing memory of all the latest scandals and affairs of the upper classes, so he could see that no passengers who might have quarrels be seated together.

I gave up trying to find a taxi by the piers so we decided to ‘hoof it’ northeast back to Penn Station where we were sure to get a cab. To do so, we had to walk through a bit of genteel Chelsea which soon gave way to the old notorious ‘Tenderloin’ district just south of the station. We crossed the New York Central’s freight tracks that ran down 10th Avenue’s cobblestoned street. The teeming tenements, filled with Jewish and Irish immigrants and their descendants, were among the roughest neighborhoods of New York, but by the Twenties had mellowed somewhat.

We walked briskly through the streets, looking up at the old five-story apartment houses with people leaning out the windows, talking to neighbors on floors above or below them.

“Oh Mrs. Goldboig!” I remember hearing one lady shout from her window. Older people sat around the old, ornate front steps, smoking and talking, looking somewhat shabby. Here and there a fashionable young woman walked briskly up the street heading for the El train on 9th Avenue.

Laundry and mattresses lined the old fire escapes, garbage piled in beat-up cans on the cobblestone streets, vendors and the old clothes man wandered the sidewalks crying their wares: “High cash clothes! High cash clothes!” the old clothes man shouted. A horse-drawn junk wagon sat on the street, the skinny horse with a straw hat, the old junk man sat contentedly smoking a pipe on his seat. The kids petted the old horse who seemed to enjoy the attention. The only thing missing from the old movie-like scene was an organ grinder and his monkey.