Lilliputia, Coney Island's Midget Community

In his book Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas asserts that in the early 1900s Coney Island became a space invested with creative experimentation: both in architectural design and for new uses for modern technology. This is not really a provocative statement, considering Coney Island has been and continues to provide artificial spectacles (to a certain degree, even the beaches are fake) for its countless numbers of visitors to enjoy. But about a century ago, the theme parks cropping up along this stretch of land just outside Manhattan were at the horizon of spectacularity and innovation. Coney Island's beaches became so overpopulated during the day, for example, that managers attempted to draw the same crowds at night, by illuminating the beach front with electric lights. Or, the roller coaster that thrilled its riders with a 'safe' sense of death, in the free-fall of electric cars guided by railway tracks. According to Koolhaas, in Coney Island these new building designs and technological uses would become employed without any 'real' function: after all, the theme park is a simulation and does not, for instance, resemble everyday Manhattan. In this light, within the first few years of the early 1900s, Coney Island would become, rather accidentally, Manhattan's other space of condensed extremes, of simulated experiments, of modern excesses. In sum, Manhattan's own carnivalesque, fun-house mirror.

Below I have an excerpt from Koolhaas' essay on Dreamland, a massive theme park complex, complete with a fully operative midget community, a big-top circus, roller coasters and freak shows unseen before by visiting audiences. Former Republican state senator William H. Reynolds, real-estate promoter and president of Dreamland, purchased his stretch of land in 1904 to build a theme park that would top Coney Island's already overcrowded attractions of mass entertainment, the final product being Dreamland, a predecessor to Walt Disney's own (now cryogenically frozen) imagination. Here is Koolhaas' account of the rise & fall of Lilliputia, Dreamland's own midget community:

"Lilliputia, the Midget City: if Dreamland is a laboratory for Manhattan, Midget City is a laboratory for Dreamland. Three hundred midgets who had been scattered across the continent as attractions at World's Fairs are offered a permanent experimental community here, 'a bit of old Nuremburg in the fifteenth century.'

Since the scale of Midget City is half the scale of the real world, the cost of building this cardboard utopia is, at least theoretically, quartered, so that extravagant architectural effects can be tested cheaply. The midgets of Dreamland have their own parliament, their own beach complete with midget lifeguard and 'a miniature Midget City Fire Department responding [every hour] to a false alarm' -effective reminder of man's existential futility.

But the true spectacle of Midget City is social experimentation. With the walls of the midget capital, the laws of conventional morality are systematically ignored, a fact advertised to attract visitors. Promiscuity, homosexuality, nymphomania and so on are encouraged and flaunted: marriages collapse almost as soon as they are celebrated; 80 percent of newborn babies are illegitimate. To increase the frisson induced by this organized anarchy, the midgets are showered with aristocratic titles, highlighting the gap between implied and actual behavior.

Midget City represents Reynolds' institutionalization of misbehavior, a continuing vicarious experience for a society preparing to shed the remnants of Victorianism.

In May 1911 the lighting system in the devils that decorate the facade of Dreamland's End of the World short-circuits. Sparks start a fire that is fanned by a strong sea wind.

Only weeks before a superior fire-fighting apparatus has been installed; the ground has been dug up once more, to add new water mains and hydrants. But somehow the new ducts have not been connected with the Atlantic, inexhaustible fire extinguisher. In shock, the fire fighters of Fighting the Flames [another Coney Island attraction] are first to desert their dormitories and the confines of Dreamland.

As real fire fighters arrive on the scene, they find no more pressure in the system than 'a garden hose.'

Fireboats are kept at a distance by the heat. Only Lilliputia's midget fire fighters -confronted with the real thing after +/- 2,500 false alarms- put up a real fight against the holocaust; they save a small piece of their Nuremburg -the fire station- but otherwise their actions are hopeless. The most pathetic victims of the disaster are the 'educated' animals that now become victims of their unlearning instinct; waiting for their teachers' permission, they escape too late, if at all. Elephants, hippos, horses, gorillas run amok, 'enveloped in flames.' Lions roam the streets in murderous panic, finally free to kill each other on their way to safety: 'Sultan...roared along Surf Avenue, eyes bloodshot, flanks torn and bleeding, mane afire...' For many years after the holocaust, surviving animals are sighted on Coney, deep in Brooklyn even, still performing their former tricks...

In three hours Dreamland burns to the ground."