The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Coney Island, which became New York City’s beach resort, a reporter noted in 1880 that it was “not pleasant when you are tumbling in the surf to have a decayed cabbage stalk or the carcass of a dead cat strike you full in the face.”