Great Carnival

SODOM BY THE SEA--Oliver Pilat and Jo Ranson--Doubleday, Doran ($3).

Coney Island was not always the garish proletarian mecca it is today. Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Sam Houston, other aristocrats disported themselves on its then remote plage. Walt Whitman too was crazy about it: "The long bare unfrequented shore ... I had all to myself . . . where I loved after bathing to race up and down."

But in 1847 a little side-wheel steamer began to take trippers to Coney from Manhattan at 50-c- a head. Later came horsecars, and then several railroads. Roughnecks, sports, plug-uglies and vulgar politicians began to jostle nice people. In 1920, when the subway reached Coney, people from the-city's steaming tenements could get dunked for two nickels, by simply wearing bathing suits under their outer clothes, discarding the latter when they got to the beach. Bitter bathhouse owners called them "drippers" because they dripped on the subways going home. Recently New York's famed and inexorable Park Commissioner Robert Moses estimated that on a jampacked Sunday each person at Coney had about 16 square feet of beach--enough for a coffin.

In Sodom by the Sea, Newsmen Pilat and Ranson narrate with raffish gusto what they call "an affectionate history" of the "island" (which by filling in its dividing ditch has long since been firmly attached to the mainland). They tell all: the evolution of the amusement parks, side shows, steeplechases, sly games to trap sucker money; the fortunes made and lost by Coney financiers ; the fires that periodically gutted the wooden jungles, during one of which lions ran in the streets with manes on fire; a female exhibitionist who smoked cigars "in a peculiar manner"; a sailor who took his girl through the darkened Old Mill ride and emerged without his pants.

A man who did a lot for Coney Island--indeed for amusement parks all over the world--was a mechanical genius named Lamarcus A. Thompson, who at the age of twelve made for his mother the first rotary churn in the U.S. Later he started a knitting mill, then began to ponder upon the fact that under certain conditions what comes down must go up. At Coney Island, in 1884, Thompson built an uphill-&-downdale gravity railroad on a wooden structure 600 ft. long, the world's first roller coaster.

At first the passengers sat sidewise on seats running the length of the cars, but seats were eventually set cross wise to permit the riders to pair off and to see, dizzily, where they were going. Eulogium over the entrance to one of Coney's ultramodern roller coasters: "This ride is a Memorial to Lamarcus A. Thompson, Inventor of Gravity."

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