Turn On The Bright Lights!

Coney Island’s Parachute Jump has been outfitted with lights:

The 277-foot tower, shaped like a giant blossom at the end of a tapering stalk, dropped its last screaming rider in 1965 and fell silent. For years it rotted, a skeletal symbol of Coney Island’s long decline, narrowly escaping demolition.

Last night, the city turned the lights back on. As an eager crowd jammed the boardwalk, a switch was thrown and the Parachute Jump was bathed in red and purple light, as shivering patterns chased each other across its girders.

There are still no riders, and no parachutes, but the jump is back in the night sky above the boardwalk.

“Not exactly how it was when I was a kid,” said Brooklyn’s borough president, Marty Markowitz, “but it will be a beacon of light for this and future generations, harking and heralding Coney Island as a place where dreams come true.”

The reviews from those assembled were muted. Phyllis Carbo, 70, who rode on the Parachute Jump as a girl, hesitated when asked for her opinion. “I’m running for Assembly on the Republican line, so I have to be very careful,” she said. “I’m impressed.”

Even the evening’s master of ceremonies, Dick Zigun, one of Coney Island’s leading boosters, pronounced the light show “very subtle.”

Others were less restrained.

“Did they light it already? Is this it?” asked Joe Joya, 63.

His wife, Jane, 61, said, “I thought it was going to be a lot brighter. I thought that the lights were going to be more of a Vegas type of thing.”

Her husband added: “You’re not going to see that from Staten Island.”

See also: Parachute Jump.