Coney Island Emporium
A Nostalgic Taste Of The Big Apple
Is Creating Smiles In Las Vegas
by
Eric Minton

As guests enter, their noses detect the unmistakable smell of cotton candy and candied apples. The odors emanate from two misters at the entrance, each infusing the air with the scents of those long-popular Coney Island treats. From somewhere above float the shrieks of passengers as roller coaster cars rattle past, though the only physical manifestations of a Coney Island coaster are segments of rusty track hanging from the ceiling. The barkers’ voices challenging someone to step right up and try their skills in a midway game are real enough, as is the general hubbub of people having fun. And the park benches, as well as the elderly folks sitting on them watching others at play, they are real, too. Short of transplanting Coney Island itself, Amusement Consultants Ltd. of New Rochelle, N.Y., has incorporated as much of the sensations and overall feel of the famous New York amusement park as they could in their Coney Island Emporium at the New York-New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nev. The family entertainment center also achieves something of a time warp, photographic murals on the wall showing the real Coney Island throughout its hey-day years from 1890 to around 1950.

Their success in capturing the ambiance of the Brooklyn play place can be measured in the numbers of visiting and transplanted New Yorkers who slip into reminisces when they enter the 32,000-square-foot facility. "The people who are in their 50s, 60s, and 70s come through looking at the large photographs and say, ‘I was there, I did that,’" says Melvin Getlan, president of Amusement Consultants. "When a grandfather brings his kids in, they say, ‘I rode that,’ or ‘I was on that beach.’ It’s a great link across generations." Getlan has even had one former Big Apple resident offer him old Coney Island tickets he still had around the house, and Mitchell Stern, the Emporium’s general manager, got phone call from a woman who claimed to be the woman in a picture taken from Coney Island’s parachute drop.

Coney Island Emporium isn’t intended to be a museum, of course, or a family album, or even a faux antique version of the old Coney Island midway and arcades. It is a modern FEC themed to fit in Las Vegas’ latest landmark hotel/casino, a 12-tower complex depicting New York City landmarks with more than 2,000 rooms and the Manhattan Express roller coaster twisting around the hotel’s exterior. The extent of the Emporium’s theming, more than the center’s location, sets it apart from other FECs; but in that, Coney Island Emporium may also be setting a standard for future entertainment centers to follow.

Amusement Consultants came to the project with actual Coney Island experience. The company, founded with one gumball machine by Isadore Getlan in 1952, is now the largest arcade operator in New York City and has run arcades at Coney Island for 15 years (though Melvin Getlan as a boy rarely visited Coney Island: "We lived in the Bronx; Coney Island’s in Brooklyn and they were bums and we were the Yankees and we didn’t mix too much"). The company also operates arcades, miniature golf courses, and FECs around the country, including the Sky-Bound Arcade at Stratosphere Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, which opened in spring 1996. Sky-Bound was the company’s first truly themed facility, with runways for floors, planes hanging from ceilings, and hand-painted murals of aircraft covering the walls of the 4,500-square-foot arcade.

Reprinted with Permission of Family Entertainment Center
November / December 1997
© 1997 Amusement Consultants, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.