My first article for Amusement Warehouse, the print magazine companion to carnivalwarehouse.com, the amusement industry website, is published this month. I wrote about Coney Island's William F. Mangels and "The Whip," the first portable thrill ride. If you know of a show or a park that still has a Whip in operation or in storage, please let me know. I'm updating my Whip Census!
My memoir about working the spot joint for Benny Harrison on Jones Walk is published today in Gramercy Review!
"I didn't go to Coney Island looking for the spot game. It found me. I'd all but given up my elusive quest to once again work my game of choice, a game of skill I learned as a carny kid in the 1960s..."
Ali Lemer and I have been working together virtually as co-producers with Charles Denson of the Coney Island Stories podcast since just a few weeks before New York declared a state of emergency in March 2020. It was great to finally meet in person, fourteen months later, at the Coney Island History Project! And I'm really proud of what we've accomplished with the podcast. You can listen via Apple, Spotify and coneyislandhistory.org/podcast.
Excited to share this article in Brooklyn Paper about Coney Island Stories, a new podcast which I co-produced with Charles Denson and Ali Lemer. It's now available for listening via Apple, Spotify, and other podcast app, as well as the History Project's website. When we started to have to work from home because of the pandemic, there was time to actually create the podcast. I wrote the scripts trying to find common themes to bring together from the Coney Island History Project's oral history archive. New episodes coming in 2021!