Coney Island Wonder Wheel and boardwalk
— — the wheel that turns slower than the ocean.
Not only on a wall.
“The Wonder Wheel has carried riders above the Atlantic since 1920, two years before Nathan's opened its first hot dog stand a block away. Sixteen of its twenty-four cars slide on curved tracks as the wheel turns, a small lurch that still surprises first-time riders. The boardwalk runs west toward the parachute jump in Brooklyn's far corner. The Cyclones play in the minor-league park across the street. The colour the place gives off is the soft electric red of the boardwalk at dusk, the kind of light that belongs to a city that has been having summer for a hundred years. from the studio
Coney Island Wonder Wheel and boardwalk, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Coney Island sits at the southern tip of Brooklyn, a peninsula that became a barrier-beach amusement district in the late nineteenth century. The Wonder Wheel opened on Memorial Day 1920, built by the Eccentric Ferris Wheel Company and standing 150 feet above the boardwalk. Denos Vourderis bought it in 1983 after promising his future wife he would one day give it to her. It earned New York City landmark status in 1989. The Riegelmann Boardwalk, completed in 1923, runs roughly 2.5 miles from West 37th Street to Brighton Beach. The Cyclone roller coaster, a wood-frame ride from 1927, still operates one block west.
The wheel reads best in the half-hour after the sun goes behind the parachute jump. The cabin glass picks up the boardwalk's bulb lights, the same warm tungsten-and-neon that has lit the strip since the Astroland years. Looking east from the top, the lights of Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach run out to the Rockaways across Jamaica Bay. The Atlantic flattens to a single dark plane, and the wheel's two thousand LEDs cycle through their colour program, visible from the Belt Parkway nearly a mile inland.
Deno's Wonder Wheel Amusement Park typically opens for the season around Palm Sunday and runs through late October, with the wheel itself operating into the evening on summer weekends. The ride lasts about eight minutes and lifts riders 150 feet above the boardwalk. The D, F, N, and Q subway lines all terminate at Coney Island–Stillwell Avenue, a four-minute walk from the wheel. Nathan's Famous, on Surf and Stillwell, has been selling hot dogs at the same corner since 1916 and hosts its July Fourth eating contest a block from the ride.