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Parachute Jump Tower

Sun., May 29, 2005

Coney Island Parachute Jump.

Since seeing it last summer, I’ve wondered about the history behind the parachute jump tower at Coney Island. Sure enough, in today’s City Section, the New York Times printed a brief history of the landmark in an article by Jake Mooney entitled “Famed for What’s Up Above, Fixing What’s Down Below.”

The 262-foot-tall tower, originally designed to train military paratroopers, opened as a ride at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. After the fair, the owners of Steeplechase Park bought it for $150,000 and moved it to Coney Island. The park shut down in 1964, and the parachute jump stood unused on an increasingly desolate stretch of land. The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s decision to designate the tower a landmark in 1977 was overturned, but the status was restored in 1989, and it stuck.

The city’s Economic Development Corporation completed a $5 million restoration of the tower in 2003 and last week, the Coney Island Development Corporation announced a winning design for the “Parachute Pavilion,” a shopping and visitor center that would be located under the jump, which won’t be reopened as a ride. I have mixed feelings about this project, which is a small part in the much larger effort to revitalize Coney Island as a tourist attraction. The place surely is dumpy and worn, but therein lies its seedy charm. Scrubbing it down and gussying it up for the tourists will only stamp out the spookyness and magic.

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