Coney Island Babies

Contingency, confusion, consternation and carnival rides.

Jun 20, 2025

I love Coney Island, and I love Lou Reed. I don’t always like them, though.

The last time I was at Coney Island a few weeks ago, the trains betrayed me, and I had to take a cab from Bensonhurst. My friend was doing an event for his book about sideshow performers beside the Bump-Your-Ass-Off concession. I had a few soapy craft beers that are supposed to be better than Miller Lite but aren’t. I watched the sword swallower and fire eater at the freak show and caught the tail end of a torrential downpour. I had a hot dog and got back on the train with a headache.

The time before, I was with my little boy and got soaked for $60 in tickets for carnival rides.

A few weeks before, I’d stopped into Sophie’s on East 5th Street for a quiet drink after a film-festival event on Avenue A. They had a proper jukebox with flipping pages of CDs. The younger crowd in the place, having been ripped off by the touchscreen jukeboxes of this century, and rendered indifferent to music by forces still more pernicious, left it alone.

I put in a few bucks. I played Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby. It’s maybe his best song. And at six minutes and change, it’s a good value.

Loud soft loud

One way to make a rock-and-roll song is to alternate soft verses with loud choruses, and they named a documentary about the Pixies after the idea. Some of the best songwriters have a similar method, mixing the profound with the down-home or straight-up stupid lines. The dumb parts lull you into thinking there’s nothing too challenging going on, no need to deploy the interpretation shields, then the smart part of the song gets in like a blade between the ribs.

It’s a hard mix to get right. Too profound, and the limits of your profundity get found out too quick. But if you go too dumb, and the bits of profundity seem like they got in there by accident. The songwriters who do it best also seem to miss the mark most of the time. But when they get it right, it’s right.

Coney Island Baby begins with a seeming banality.

You know, man, when I was a young man in high school
You believe it or not, I wanted to play football for the coach
And all those older guys
They said that he was mean and cruel, but you know
Wanted to play football for the coach
They said I was a little too light weight to play linebacker
So's I'm playing right end

Sounds dumb, but we’re not in a Buffalo Wild Wings. We’re talking to Lou Reed. He’s inviting us to meet the young man he was - his good-faith efforts in a bad-faith world. He’s inviting us to attempt some tenderness for that young man, because things are going to get really hard.

You know the place

This song doesn’t take place in Coney Island, or even mention it as a place. And we already know we’re not in a Buffalo Wild Wings, so where are we?

When you're all alone and lonely in your midnight hour
And you find that your soul it's been up for sale
And you begin to think 'bout all the things that you've done
And begin to hate just 'bout everything

For many of us, this is a location that takes more effort to avoid than to find. It’s a place where Lou can get close enough to whisper.

Birth and sand

Coney Island was originally named for the rabbits who used to have the run of the place. Rabbits are mostly famous mostly for procreating. They’ll have baby rabbits until the ground is bare, and they all starve to death. In Australia, the new inhabitants built a fence across the entire continent to keep one half of it from being overrun, as the first half had been.

Sunken treasure

I have a personal, familial, and creative history with Coney Island, and I can attest to its eerie power. No matter how much is happening there, it always feels like more is really going on.

As a symbol, Coney Island is only half-visible. It’s either sinking into the unconscious or poking through the surface of it. Coney Island is a shorthand for something. We all know what. But when pressed, we differ, we stutter and lose confidence. But we have a feeling.

Disambiguation

When they named the famous punk venue on St. Mark’s Place Coney Island High, they meant something. When Henry Miller and Lawrence Ferlinghetti made reference to A Coney Island of the Mind, they meant something, too.

A Coney Island jellyfish is named for the used condoms that one still finds on the beach. They’re not-quite-alive things, like the eyeless invertebrates they imprison and the eyeless invertebrates for which they’re named.

Where do Coney Island jellyfish come from? Most likely from overloaded storm drains in Brooklyn and Staten Island after a strong storm. But in the collective imagination, they come from Under the Boardwalk, where the young and poor, with no private place to call their own, famously make like rabbits.

The threshold of incarnation

The redolence of the place is a draw, even if you’re not into the food, the rides or the noise. Something is happening there, something important. The sea and the shade of the boardwalk hints at something like Plotinus’ take on the cave of the nymphs from this Odyssey - we have arrived at a loom upon which humanity itself is being woven.

It’s also a loom upon which American culture has been woven. To list the songs, films, books, poems and television shows that have drawn on Coney Island would be both exhaustive and surprising - like with Annie Hall. I’ll leave that homework for someone else. We’re going somewhere specific.

But it also sucks

Walking down the boardwalk with a beer-and-nitrates headache, I ran into a fellow parent from the neighborhood. We barely noticed each other until we passed. She was lost in outrage after being badly ripped off when the card from one of the mini amusement parks erased all the money she’d put on it, leaving her at the front of the line for a ride with an unhappy kiddo.

You go to Coney Island and you expect to get ripped off, just not double ripped off. More fool you.

The second Nathan’s

What was Coney Island to Lou? In 1976, when the song came out, it was pretty much the Coney Island captured in the film The Warriors (1978). But Coney Island had found Lou before that. There was a Nathan’s in Oceanside, the second location of that Coney Island institution, a huge place and a popular hangout for a generation of Long Island teenagers, including Lou.

Long Island looms large in the beginning of the song - the place where nothing much was happening at all, where Lou’s parents sent him to a mental hospital for ECT, and where his life was saved by rock and roll. In one live version of the song, Lou remarks “Freeport, right?” by way of explaining his football aspirations, and then he recites the stops on the Babylon Branch of the LIRR, which he knows by heart.

On commuter trains, they’re always announcing the stops, in order. They do it when arriving at a stop, and as they leave. You hear that order a lot. I work with people who take the commuter trains in and out of Penn Station, and if I asked them to tell me the stops, they’d know them by heart, but would probably recite them in the order they hear on the outbound train, when they’re going home from the city.

But in the song, Lou recites them on the inbound order, along the trajectory of his desires, and of his life.

The real Coney Island babies

Lou isn’t the only one to write a song called Coney Island Baby. In most, the baby is a lover, an object of affection and attraction. But there’s another character who better fits the name.

These are the infants whose lives were saved by incubators installed as a sideshow attraction in Coney Island. In 1903, Luna Park and Dreamland both charged people to peer through the glass at the premature, undersized and sickly infants kept alive by the new technology.

This was when Coney Island was near its peak as an attraction, when it was better lit than the island of Manhattan, when they built and dug the train lines for massive weekend crowds, train lines that live on today as subway lines through much of Brooklyn.

Incubator technology new at that point. The doctor who popularized it at medical conferences and World’s Fairs before bringing it to Coney Island and Atlantic City, was - appropriately - later discovered not to have been a doctor. No matter. It saved the lives of untold numbers of babies.

The children who emerged from these incubators never would have existed, but for whimsy and science. Forsaken by nature yet saved by electricity and entertainment, these are the Coney Island babies.

The I-thou of it

I first heard the song itself on a bar jukebox at the Cafe Right Bank in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At that age, about 23, I wasn’t a huge Lou Reed fan. But the song spoke to me directly.

As a young man in high school, I too had wanted to play football for the coach, though he was mean and cruel, I had found the city to be a funny place, found my soul to have been up for sale, and, having started to hate just about everything, I nonetheless suspected that the glory of love might see me through.

Two bits

The song goes on and, Lou leaves behind his travails on Long Island for more recent betrayals.

When all your two-bit friends
have gone and ripped you off
They're talking behind your back saying
man, you're never gonna be no human being

A two-bit friend is common shorthand for a friend who’s neither very loyal nor very generous. The slang “two bits” was already antiquated by the 1970s, the stuff of black-and-white gangster movies. The phrase, more specifically, refers to a quarter - twenty-five cents - also the price people paid to go look at the newborns kept alive by the incubators on the boardwalk.

Did Lou do his homework? Was it a coincidence? I doubt both. Sometimes you get an idea, but sometimes an idea gets you, whether you understand it or not. And some things just have a way of finding their way to the surface. Who knows? Maybe Lou just liked the title of one of the old songs, like he did the title of the Nelson Ahlgren novel, and ran with it.

Who’s speaking

The song reaches a climax in a chorus about the glory of love, and here says “I’m a Coney Island baby.” And that seems to be the truth of the song. He repeats it in a whisper, rhythmically, carelessly, at the threshold of something.

In that moment past inhibition, Lou says he’s a child who never would have been if not for the unrestrained opportunism of carnival conmen and the whims of lookie-loos.

These two-bit friends who file past the glass will rip you off. They’ll publicly doubt your humanity. But you owe your existence to them. No wonder the confusion.

Confusion was inevitable, but confusion wasn’t Lou’s problem. Lou didn’t misunderstand his situation in Nassau County - he understood it perfectly. And he’s asking you, as his confidant now, where else could your instincts have led you from that place, except where you went?

And while you may owe your existence to those two-bit friends of electricity and entertainment, your life is another matter. You owe that to someone else. Maybe it’s the princess on the hill, who loved you even though she knew you were made wrong, or acting wrong, or both. Maybe it’s to the glory of love itself.

Something like a circus or a sewer

Living within time, every human life is unprecedented. But the rapid transformation in the conditions of human life in the 20th century were enough scramble anyone’s instincts, to say nothing of today’s situation.

If a Coney Island baby is the most contingent creature of the 20th century, it points to a wider contingency, a wider confusion, a wider mixture of allegiances and motives among all of us. The lives of most of us eight billion people are contingent on the two-bit friends of electricity, antibiotics, ammonium nitrate, and industrial-scale distraction. These are the survival-granting figures who stand above us when we try to say mama or dada with an open heart.

Six minutes and change

While the song played on the jukebox at Sophie’s the other night, and I sipped my Miller Lite, some guys sidled up to order drinks. They were young, wearing the vests of their employers. One said he hated Lou Reed. Another one agreed. I wanted to get mad.

But why bother? These poor guys had been raised on music designed to cover footfalls of waitstaff and kitchen noise of restaurants, to forgive and encourage the standard boorishness of college parties - music made to be good enough for as many people as possible.

You may like what’s good, but for what’s indefensible, love is required.

It starts with our bodies, which are indefensible. Love is required. The technocrats putting their mixed drinks on a card all agree: They hate Lou. They like Netflix. They like to agree. Good luck, fellas.

I, however, maintain that Lou was correct. There’s a glory to love.

Buy me a coffee!

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