(
)
Joan Finkelstein expected the nervous shakes. She had agreed to marry Edwin Howard just after meeting him in March 1952. By July of that year, she was headed to his aunt’s house in Coney Island to meet his family for the first time.
When she got there, she noticed it wasn’t she that had the shakes. It was the walls. She looked frantically around the house and, while the china hanging on the walls was rumbling, nothing was crashing to the ground and no one else was batting an eye. Either this is an earthquake, she thought, or I’m losing my mind.
“Oh, that’s just the roller coaster,” Howard reassured her, as her daughter Janine Gorell recalls. “It’s going to go over a lot because it’s July.”
The shaken bride-to-be eventually relaxed, accepting that she was about to become a part of this strange family that lived under Coney Island’s Thunderbolt roller coaster.
If all this sounds familiar, it should: It’s the same house seen in Woody Allen’s 1977 film “Annie Hall.” Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, grew up living there. “Maybe that accounts for my personality, which is a little nervous, I think,” Alvy says.
The house was originally the Kensington Hotel, built in 1895, one of many boardwalk inns at the beach resort. In 1925, George Moran bought the hotel and carried out a seemingly bizarre plan: constructing a ride directly on top of the hotel on a narrow strip of land at Bowery Street and West 15th Street, across from what is now MCU Park.
He enlisted designer John Miller, the pioneering coaster engineer who invented the chain mechanism that makes the distinctive clickety-clack sound of roller coasters. Miller placed one of the ride’s hairpin turns only yards above the house, which Moran lived in with his wife, Molly.
It was the first coaster of its kind in
Coney Island, and the steel beams supporting the ride ran straight through the house.
“You don’t tear down buildings in Coney Island if you can help it,” Moran said at the time. For decades, the ride was just as popular as its still-standing rival, the Cyclone, which is two years younger, and the close-knit clan adapted to the mayhem.
“The house itself is really kind of a ride,” says Richard Diamond, 53, the Morans’ great-nephew. “People were screaming and yelling as they were in fear of going down the roller coaster. And there we were, sitting having cake, having coffee.”
Inside, the house looked like any other big ethnic abode of the time, except that the decorative china plates and a floor-to-ceiling mirror had to be bolted to the wall. A baby grand piano occupied one room; a chandelier swayed but never broke.
“The ride would put me to sleep at night,” says Ilean Stein, 78, of Cherry Hill, NJ, who often stayed with her aunt in the house, along with generations of the Morans’ extended family. You could tell a Moran kid because they were the ones walking under the ride with their heads down, looking for things passengers had dropped. They found wigs, dentures, jewelry, purses, luggage and, once, a wedding dress.
“If it was only change, we could keep it,” Stein says. “If it was anything more than that, we had to give it back.”
George Moran died in 1965 and Molly followed in 1978, leaving their son Fred to run the ride and live in the home with his longtime girlfriend, Mae Timpano. But when Fred died in 1982, Timpano decided to sell the property to Kansas Fried Chicken mogul Horace Bullard.
With dreams of redeveloping the site into a new theme park, Bullard shut down the Thunderbolt but allowed Timpano to continue living in the house. While Bullard negotiated with the city and bankers, the ride fell into disrepair, vines overtaking the wooden planks and foliage obscuring the entrance. Timpano, the last family member to occupy the house, finally moved out in 1988, conceding to her family’s worries about her safety.
By the time a fire ravaged the house under the coaster in 1991, Bullard’s plans had unraveled. In November 2000, with MCU Park under construction, Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent bulldozers in before dawn to tear the Thunderbolt down, a move a court later declared illegal.
Timpano sat in a car and cried as she watched workers hack at her former home. She admired the stubbornness of the ride, which seemed to be putting up a fight.
“They had a job,” Timpano says of the workers in the 2005 documentary “Under the Roller Coaster.” “They kept on hitting it and hitting it.”
Dick Zigun, the longtime unofficial mayor of Coney Island, at the time called it “an assassination of a piece of history.”
After 13 years that have seen the disappearance of Coney Island stalwarts such as Cha Cha’s, Shoot the Freak and, just this month, the Astrotower, the Thunderbolt is one piece of Coney Island’s history that’s now making a comeback.
Zamperla, the company that operates the Cyclone and the new Luna Park, recently announced plans to build a $10 million version of the Thunderbolt on the same piece of land, to open next May. The ride will use the Thunderbolt’s original logo, but will add modern coaster technology, including backward loops, corkscrew turns and a 125-foot drop.
Paying tribute to the original ride was a no-brainer for the company that copied the name and design of Luna Park for the revived version that opened in 2010, says Central Amusement International President Valerio Ferrari.
“Coney Island was where all the most beautiful amusement rides were invented back in the day,” he says. “It’s been quite some time since Coney Island had a large coaster like that.”
For the Moran family, the news was like walking back into a childhood playroom after all these years.
“People have realized they have a jewel they need to polish,” says Harold Kramer, a nephew of George and Molly. “Rides beat vacant lots any day of the week.”
Kramer, 55, has become the keeper of the Thunderbolt flame. His Boulevard Tavern in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is a shrine to the coaster. The walls are lined with photos of the ride, including one with Blondie singer Debbie Harry posing out front in 1977. Years ago he tried to buy one of the old Thunderbolt cars for bar seating, but it proved too expensive.
Sometimes after closing up the bar at 5 a.m., Kramer will drive down to Coney Island to watch the sun rise.
“I wish that I [had been] a little bit older,” he says. “I would’ve gone down there and talked to Freddie about running the ride for him.”
The Moran family hopes to be involved with the new Thunderbolt, whether it’s through a plaque at the site or by speaking at the dedication. But what the family wants most isn’t physically possible — a re-creation of their house under the coaster, serving as a gift shop or museum.
“It was a big part of my childhood,” says Gorell, now 57, whose great-aunt and uncle were George and Molly. “You think what you have is normal, but when you get to be an adult, you look back and think, ‘Wow, that is really cool.’ ”
tdonnelly2@nypost.com