Coney Island

For a stretch of the early twentieth century, Reno had its own riverside playground named for the famous one in Brooklyn. Coney Island sat on the Truckee, an amusement and picnic resort where city residents came for the water, the grounds, and a day's escape from downtown. It belonged to an age when rivers were recreation and a streetcar or a short drive took families to open-air pleasure spots on summer afternoons. The resort faded as tastes and the riverfront changed, but the marker recalls a livelier, more innocent stretch of the Truckee east of the city.

What the plaque says

Opened to the public on June 20 1909, Coney Island was among the most elaborate amusement parks of its day. Otto G. Benschuetz, founder and owner, landscaped the grounds, put in a children's playground, a bandstand for outdoor concerts and a dance pavilion which also served as a skating rink and theatre. Coney Island also had an artificial lake complete with boats, covered landings and bath houses. The park's heyday passed with Benschuetz's death in 1912. An aircraft assembly plant occupied the site in the early 'twenties' and an auto court was established here later. The pavilion was destroyed by fire in 1927 and a second blaze in 1930 took other structures. All remaining buildings were torn down when Interstate 80 was constructed in the 1960's.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 1.8 mi
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
• Virginia City — 17 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Chollar Mine — 18 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Sand Harbor — 25 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers

More markers nearby

• Sparks — 0.8 mi
• The Fight of the Century — 0.9 mi
• Glendale School (1864- 1958) — 1.4 mi
• Chinese in Nevada — 1.4 mi