Cappuccino Thoughts 74: On New York's Most Well Known, Least Understood Secret
A sketch of Coney Island
Coney Island. The name alone is enough to strike a strong reaction from every New Yorker.
“I’ve never been,” was the resounding response I heard from every Manhattanite and most Brooklyners. Most said it with a hint of pride, as if they wouldn’t deign to be caught at such a tourist trap. As if not having gone there made them somehow truer New Yorkers, in the eyes of….whom exactly? Some people even said it with a hint of revulsion, wondering why on earth I would spend one day of my Memorial Day weekend out there. “Does the train even go that far?”
Yes, dear reader, it does. In fact, it’s the very last stop on the Q train.
The Q is New York’s most cinematic train. (I will never tire of staring at the scenery as the metro shoots out of the darkness and onto the Manhattan Bridge.) So it was no surprise to me that this train would be our carriage to the faraway lands of Coney Island.
Coney Island is an iconic American institution. It’s been memorialized in renowned films including Brooklyn and Big, as well as less canonical but still entertaining movies like Two Weeks Notice and Men in Black 3.
It’s a place nearly everyone has heard of yet few really know.
Of course, Coney Island is most famous for its amusement park, Luna Park. Families speaking Mandarin, Tagalog, Spanish, Russian, German, and so much more ambled gamely into the park to board bumper cars, take pictures in the photo booths, or hop on a roller coaster. I was coaxed onto a roller coaster, the first I’ve been on in at least a decade. I kept my eyes closed the entire time and, when the torture finally came to an end, unclenched my fists and noticed angry nail marks in the palms of my hands. Suffice it to say, I will not be riding again.
Friends, families, people young and old, but mostly very young or very old, ran down the boardwalk, or else sat on one of the benches and observed the passing scene. A sign declared one bench “parking for Puerto Ricans only.” Several particularly enterprising people had set up small stands selling empanadas and ice cold water and soda, a respite from the scorchingly hot day. At the end of the pier, a few brave souls dunked fishing poles into the water and waited for a tug. Goodness knows what you might fish out of the waves at Coney Island.
Most everyone seemed to be having a good time. I was struck by how at least half the crowd was speaking Russian.
I’ve been thinking recently about my relationship with Russia. For those not up on their Cappuccino Thoughts lore, I studied Russian in college, just a few years before Putin senselessly invaded Ukraine. Now, it seems unlikely that I’ll get to go back to Russia or take my long-hoped for trip to Kiev, the city from which my great-grandparents emigrated. (My great-grandfather walked—walked—from Kiev to Hamburg, Germany before boarding a ship bound for Ellis Island.)
What a joy, then, to walk through “Little Odessa,” that is, Brighton Beach, the neighborhood right next to Coney Island. The area is not a “discovery” to the tens of thousands of people who call it home, but I didn’t realize the extent to which it would capture the sense of being in Eastern Europe. The signs for the apteka (pharmacy), market, and even a psychic were in the Cyrillic alphabet and haphazardly transliterated into the Latin alphabet, as if to say, “Here this language is central.”
I walked gleefully into Ocean View Café, a Russian café with a massive Ukrainian flag displayed on its outdoor dining structure. The menu was in Russian with English translations on the side. “You should get everything that looks good to you,” F. encouraged me. I ordered piles of pelmeni (my favorite dumplings and a Russian classic), blini with tovorg (a salty sweet farmer’s cheese), and, of course, borscht. “Oh wait, and two glasses of компот,” I added. It’s a juice made from dried fruits, usually apricot, though this one was made from вишней (sour cherries). I laughed that, even in the summer, the “cold” drink was served without ice. (Many Eastern Europeans fear that drinking liquids that are too cold will make you sick.)
I forgot the habit I had formed by the end of my time in Russia, to beg for everything to be served “bez ukropa,” (without dill, please for the love of god). I had to consume so many bushels of it on my travels that just the smell makes me a little sick to my stomach. I tried to eat around the devil’s herb, abandoning my bowl of borscht in the process.
We topped off our ridiculously carb-heavy meal with two glasses of tea served out of podstakanniki (the heavy metal-bottomed glass jugs that are common on the trains, because they’re hard to spill).
We walked across a busy street to Tashkent Market, where I loaded up on hard-to-find favorites I hadn’t seen since I left Moscow in 2019. One sip of Greenfield’s raspberry crumble tea transported me right back to sitting in a café near the Kremlin, unaware of how much the global order would change in a few years.
Bags of groceries in hand, we wandered back over to the quiet end of the beach, away from Luna Park. This was the first day of the summer season, the first day lifeguards were on duty, their skin still pale, the tenor of their whistles still bright and full of authority, not resignation. Beach toys were intact; bathing suits were freshly unwrapped, not soggy or saggy; colorful umbrellas lined the shore as the first hot rays of summer beat down on everyone. We unfurled our grocery bags we had just been given, used them as makeshift towels and laid down on the sand. I inhaled and heard the sounds of children laughing, teenagers gossiping, pensioners complaining. I smelled salt water, sunscreen, and….I swear, just at the tip of my nose, the dill wafting in from Ocean Parkway.
Coney Island, then, is exactly what makes New York so wonderful. It’s both widely known and a complete mystery. It’s iconically American and a microcosm of many of the different cultures that give this city its texture. It has something for every age. It’s New York’s most well-known secret.
Diary of an entrepreneur
It was a week for happy customers! I love seeing you all carrying the bags! There are just a few more bags in stock before I do a big restock next month. Check them out here.
Look of the week
This to me is the perfect example of dressing to be dressed and not dressing for attention. This woman looks utterly CHIC in trainers, perfectly cropped tan cigarette pants, a tan sweater, and a beige jacket with the collar turned up just so. She has nailed the proportions here, leaving just a hint of sock exposed, a few inches of the sweater hanging below the jacket, and cuffed sleeves. She’s paired it all with a timeless Louis Vuitton bag and a perfect pixie cut. I spotted her in Paris, bien sûr. She cuts against the “Connecticut blah,” as my grandmother calls beige, with a well balanced mix of textures and tones. Sometimes simple really is best. To all the Lower East Side gals piling on every last accessory (or, in some cases, taking nearly everything off), take note!
What’s on the bedside table
I read a rather fun book, Border Crossings: A Journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway, written and illustrated by Emma Fick. The book follows the author’s journey traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Beijing to Mongolia to Moscow. She stops at Ulanbaatar and the Mongolian steppe, Lake Baikal, the deepest and largest freshwater lake, Nizhny Novgorod, and more. I loved reading the small details she observed, and the illustrations vividly recreate many scenes of her trip. I have long dreamed of taking this famed Railway. Alas, I think it will be a long time before that is possible, so, for now, it was fun to live vicariously through her journey.
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This week I will be….seeing Patriots and celebrating my brother’s college graduation in the woods of New Hampshire.
Catch up on recent issues:
Who are these people who don’t go to Coney Island? I feel like we must live in different New Yorks!