The Coney Island of Canarsie (Published 2007)

A HUNDRED years ago, an amusement park opened its gates on a site hugging the southeastern shore of Brooklyn. Tens of thousands of thrill seekers traveled to the resort, which featured the mandatory attractions of the day: a tunnel of love, a roller coaster, a dance pavilion, a circus. Given the proximity to the water, seafood was undoubtedly devoured, and sunburn could not have been further from the minds of the frolicking beachgoers.

The name on the archway of this seaside theme park did not read Dreamland, Luna Park or even Steeplechase. Those signs were a few miles away in Coney Island. Instead, on May 30, 1907, New Yorkers reaching the end of the Canarsie line found themselves at the Golden City Amusement Park.

Canarsie has always comfortably played the part of the city’s final thought, as the last stop on the L train, the punch line for a vaudeville joke, or the resting place for many unsuspecting individuals, underscored when watching “Goodfellas” and a recent installment of “The Sopranos,” if you know what I mean.

While Coney Island’s past has been almost obsessively documented, details about Golden City are limited and photographs even rarer. Online, memories of the park include no stories of culinary breakthroughs or grainy footage of an elephant electrocution or articles describing the minute-by-minute details of a devastating fire, each a well-documented moment of Coney Island’s illustrious past.

Postcards capturing the face of Sodom by the Sea, as Coney Island’s amusement park was known, have been handed down through generations. By contrast, Golden City’s legacy is morsels of sparse information found on a mist of Brooklyn-themed Web sites. Stories are more likely to be shared by boxing historians recounting major and amateur fights showcased at the park’s Canarsie Stadium, or parents passing along memories of performances, such as King Pharaoh the “Wonder Horse,” that graced the waterfront venues.

Close to a century later, the singer-songwriter Billy Joel further cemented Golden City’s unrecognized retreat into ancient Brooklyn lore. His 2001 instrumental song titled “Waltz No. 1 (Nunley’s Carousel)” was written as an homage to a beloved carousel at Nunley’s, an amusement park once located in Baldwin, Long Island. Is the Piano Man aware that the carousel, carved by men from Brooklyn named Stein and Goldstein, was a transplant to Nassau County from its original birthplace in Golden City?

Fans of the borough’s lost past are fortunate that John Denton, an unofficial historian of the neighborhood, was able to look back and capture Canarsie’s transformation from sleepy fishing community to resort destination in a series of articles for the local newspaper, The Canarsie Courier.

In one article, Mr. Denton described a day in 1911 when a young Mae West ventured to Canarsie to entertain at the Husman Music Hall, just outside the park gates.

In another article, Mr. Denton recalled that once inside the grounds, visitors were led on a path of oysters and clamshells to a peculiar collection of activities, including a dark, devil-filled fun house, a game called “Kill the Kats” that involved baseballs and feline dolls, and a motorcycle-themed spectacle called “The Wall of Death Ride.”

The amusement park eventually fell victim to its increasingly rowdy reputation, not to mention the jokes inspired by the neighborhood’s name. In the late 1920s, residents and local business leaders nearly succeeded in getting the community renamed Lindport, to honor the great aviator Charles Lindbergh but, more important, to disassociate themselves from a barrage of mockery on the part of vaudeville entertainers. The affectionate ribbing would continue for some time as Canarsie was peppered in material featured on “The Honeymooners” and films starring the Three Stooges.

In the 1930s, Brooklyn’s forgotten little amusement park, Golden City, was razed to make way for development, not of waterfront condos or hotels but rather of a parkway now known as the Belt, offering the boroughs outside Manhattan a direct artery to — you guessed it — Coney Island.