Coney Island Dance Halls

Background: Coney Island offered eight large dance halls, each with a distinctive culture and customer. Reformers often targeted dance halls as a corrupting force for immigrant and working-class women. Beatrice Stevenson catalogued Coney Island dance hall venues for the Women's Municipal League.

At the largest and most exclusive, Saturday night sees an enormous crowd of elaborately dressed girls and men of good appearance and grooming. At other places girls are more plainly dressed, wear shirtwaists and street hats, and at still others the girls are of coarse appearance and are flashily dressed. The forms of dancing and behavior vary at the three grades of halls; in the most fashionable there is a good deal of promiscuous intercourse, flirting and picking up of acquaintances, but the dancing itself is usually proper and conventional; in the most Bohemian, behavior is free and pronouncedly bad forms of dancing are seen.

Source: Beatrice L. Stevenson, “Working Girls’ Life at Coney Island,” Yearbook of the Women's Municipal League, Nov. 1911, p. 19. Cited in Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986, p. 126)