Astroland Rides Into Darkness

A woman looks out over Astroland and other Coney Island attractions from a ride in New York, Thursday, April 5, 2007. In operation since 1962, Astroland's gates will close for good after Labor Day, and the amusement park will torn down to make way for a planned $2 billion Coney Island makeover. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) (Seth Wenig - AP)

NEW YORK -- On a Coney Island afternoon, as the screams echo from deep inside the haunted house and laughter rings above the thump of the bumper cars, the good times would seem destined to roll on forever at the Astroland Amusement Park.

Carol Albert knows better.

Her husband's family opened the venerable beachfront attraction in 1962, delighting generations of visitors across the years with its simple surfside charms. But the end is three months away at Astroland, which goes dark shortly after Labor Day _ all the neon and the rides and the booths rolling out on a tide that will never return.

In its place comes a planned $2 billion Coney Island makeover, a proposal to convert the once-seedy stretch of Brooklyn into a year-round stop with a swanky Vegas-style hotel and glitzy indoor attractions. Albert, who sold the 3-acre family property for an undisclosed price to developer Thor Equities last November, remains in intermittent denial about Astroland's impending demise.

"It's like a lightbulb that goes on and off," Albert says. "There are moments when you really realize this is the last year, and you feel absolutely terrible. And then there's a flicker and you think, `This can't be happening.'

"I guess that's the best way to describe it."

Albert sits in a nondescript two-story gray building, tucked off a street named for her late father-in-law, that serves as Astroland's cramped headquarters. Its walls are covered with pictures and memorabilia from 45 years in the amusement park business, a mini-museum of Coney Island history.

When Dewey Albert debuted Astroland during the Kennedy administration, a New York Times story described the amusement park as "the first major project for frivolous purposes in Coney Island in 25 years."

Its name reflected the Cold War space race and the future, with "space age rides" that replaced tamer local fare like the famous Feltman's Carousel. A red, white and blue rocket ship, now an artifact of the past, still rises above the rides with "ASTROLAND PARK" painted across its fuselage.

Across the next four decades, the park became an anchor for the ever-changing neighborhood _ surviving through hard economic times, urban renewal, racial tensions, the crack epidemic.

"Coney Island was reflecting what was going on in larger society," Carol Albert recalls. "There were quite a few years here when there were very lean times."

In recent years, as Coney Island rebounded, so did Astroland's fortunes. But now the neighborhood's rebirth will come partly through the death of Astroland, which faces extinction as surely as departed predecessors like Luna Park and Dreamland.