Coney Island and its historic luna park Astroland it's closing, and I went to photograph what in a month will start to be demolished, and a place that soon will completely change its face. The Cyclone, Wonder Wheel, Parachute Jump, real new york landmarks, will be replaced by a fancy and expensive luna park that few of the people who live there in poor and overcrowded projects will be able to afford. It's even very likely that these projects will be replaced by luxurious condos Las Vegas style, and all of its people will have to move.

C.B. and Anthony Gallo are the two men left owning the last open games (Shoot the Starts and Basketball game). The last one is an Italo-american who has been working in his little stand for more than 35 years. At the end of the month he will have to close and he's afraid to end up in the street. But he also talks with a lot of pride of the daughter of Isabella Rossellini, Elettra, coming to do a fashion shoot in his stand, right next to him, and for a moment it seems that his worries fade away in a smile.

Unfortunately even Coney Island, like the CBGB, will be lost and what Woody Allen described as the "big american dream, the illusion of a wonderful world where anybody could by happy" will soon disappear in the historic memory of the city, as many of those american dreams that few people only really know ever happened.

Brooklyn, December 2006