This institute came valiantly to the aid of the Academy project and saved the day. While it has no proprietary interest in the new structure, it is its chief tenant, and the new Academy was planned in detail to meet the needs of this popular educational institution. So, while the old Academy had a single auditorium, the new has a half-dozen big and comfortable meeting-places. On a single night Brooklyn can snap its fingers at the Metropolitan Opera House, over across the East river, and can gather within its own Temple of Song—a spacious and elegant theater which receives the Metropolitan company once a week during the season—can place another great audience in the adjoining Music Hall, with its well-renowned pipe-organ; in still another hall hear some traveler show his pretty pictures and tell of distant climes and strange peoples; in a lofty ballroom, hold formal reception and dance; and gather in a still smaller hall to hear Professor Something-or-other discuss the geological strata of Iceland or the like. In this way, several audiences, all bent on divers purposes, can be assembled in this big and passing handsome structure and yet be completely independent of each other. The new Brooklyn Academy, wrought after a hard fight, is no tiny toy.
The building was largely a labor of love to those who succeeded in getting the subscriptions for it. Its maintenance is today almost a labor of love for its stockholders are not alone the wealthy bankers and the merchants of the town. Its stock-list is as catholic as its endeavors—and they are legion. It is designed to be eventually a gathering-place for the butcher, the baker, the candle-stick maker; all the sturdy folk who have their homes from Greenpoint to Coney island.
*****
An early Brooklyn Citizen
"One thing more," you demand. "How about Coney island?"
Coney island is a part of Brooklyn. It is also the most advertised and the most over-rated show place in the whole land. While the older Brooklyn used to drive down to that sand-spit facing the sea for clams and for fish-dinner in the summer days, it is only within the past few years that it has been commercialized and an attempt made to place it upon a business basis. We are inclined to think that the attempt, measured in the long run, has been a failure. It began about ten years ago, when the standard of entertainment at the famous beach had fallen low. A young man, with a gift for the show business, created a great amusement park there by the side of the sea.
"People do not come to Coney island to see the ocean," he said. "They come down here for a good time."
It looked as if he was right. His amusement park was a great novelty and for a time a tremendous success. It had splendid imitators almost within a stone-throw—its name and its purpose were being copied all the way across the land. Perhaps people did not go to Coney island, after all, to see the cool and lovely ocean.
But after a time the fickle taste of metropolitan New York seemed to change. New Yorkers did not seem to care quite as much for the gay creations of paint and tinsel, the eerie cities that were born anew each night in the glories of electric lighting. Fire came to Coney island—again and again. It scoured the paint and tinsel cities, thrust the highest of their towers, a blackened ruin, to the ground. Pious folk said that God was scourging Coney island for its contempt for His laws. And the fact remains that it has not regained the preëminence of its position ten years ago.