World Tourism Blog

3-acre theme park opens over Memorial Day weekend

NEW YORK - Brooklyn’s famous Coney Island amusement park, home to the historic Cyclone roller coaster and Wonder Wheel, got some new neighbors with the opening of a new park named for an old one: Luna Park.

The 19 new rides at Luna Park will be phased in, and they’ll have some famous company: the Cyclone, a wooden coaster built in 1927, and the giant Wonder Wheel, which stands 150 feet (45 meters) high and was built in 1920. Both are New York City landmarks. Nathan’s Famous hot dog eatery is a few blocks away.

The new Luna Park is named for a now-defunct park that opened in 1903 and was known as an “Electric Eden,” according to Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. In its heyday, it attracted 90,000 visitors a day.

The first Luna Park featured hundreds of thousands of lights — such a spectacle that people started using the phrase, “It’s lit up like Luna Park.” By 1907, visitors were mailing more than a million postcards a week out of the Coney Island post office.

Luna Park was destroyed in a 1944 electrical fire. An estimated 750,000 people stood watching the 10-alarm blaze from the Coney Island beach.

The arrival of its namesake, declared City Planning Commissioner Amanda M. Burden, is “a great day for Coney Island fans all over the globe.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the new park heralds a turnaround following “decades of disinvestment and neglect” that shrank Coney Island’s “storied” amusement district to “a shell of its former glory.”

“This will galvanize the whole area,” Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show.

Robert C. Lieber, deputy mayor for economic development, said the “expanded amusement district that will help Coney Island retake its former glory.”

Coney Island remains an inexpensive attraction for amusement-park fans, served by several subway lines and located right on the beach and boardwalk.

People enjoy one of the rides at Luna Park on Saturday — the opening day of Luna Park on Coney Island.

Climbing the Statue of Liberty or catching the view from the Empire State Building are still top New York attractions but tourists are also scrambling to see where their favorite TV shows are filmed.

Whether it’s the exterior of Carrie Bradshaw’s Greenwich Village apartment in “Sex and the City” or the Bada Bing club made famous in “The Sopranos,” TV location tours are a booming business in the Big Apple.

More than 15,000 people from 40 countries have taken “The Sopranos” tour since it was launched in 2001, and at least a thousand people a week board buses to see the locations featured in “Sex and the City.”

Fans are also heading to the swanky Upper East Side of Manhattan to get a peek into the privileged lives of the teenagers in the popular TV series “Gossip Girl.”

“We keep our eyes on shows that feature New York City prominently. For ‘Sex and the City,’ people considered New York to be the fifth girl character,” said Meagan Hess, online marketing manager for On Location Tours, which conducts the tours.

“ ‘Gossip Girl’ takes place in New York City. It plays a prominent role, not only in the settings but in the shaping of the characters,” she added.

Eighty percent of the filming of “Gossip Girl,” which follows the lives of Serena, Blair, Chuck, Dan, Vanessa and Nate who are wealthy teens living in one of new New York’s richest areas, is done on the city’s streets.

“There is a lot of money that goes into the show,” said Rachel Moulton, a 25-year-old actress and guide said during a recent tour.

Launched in May, the three-hour “Gossip Girl” bus tour which runs twice a week on Friday and Sunday afternoons ferries tourists, from the U.S. and abroad, to the shops, restaurants, bars, museums and hotels featured in the show. Hard money training