Help Green-Wood pay tribute to a Coney Island original

We know, we know, sometimes you can get Kickstarter fatigue because everyone and their mom seems to have one this year. It’s not all Zach Braff movies and ridiculous camping arrangements though. Take Green-Wood Cemetery for instance, and their call for help in putting together a tribute to William Mangels, a Green-Wood permanent resident who built ride after ride in his Coney Island factory in the early 1900s. That’s the kind of call for help that any civic-minded Brooklynite can get behind.

Green-Wood wants to build an exhibition saluting Mangels, who built rides for Coney Island in the early days that were so distinctive that he wound up in the Coney Island History Project Hall of Fame and the Hall of Fame of the International Association of Amusement Park and Attractions. So, obviously a certifiable legend of amusement parks who’s also buried in Green-Wood deserves a tribute from them. Where do you come in though?

Green-Wood already has some old Mangels rides, and even pieces from an old shooting gallery he designed, but it turns out people around the country collect this stuff, and some of them have agreed to lend their pieces to Green-Wood. The cemetery has to pay for shipping the collectibles to Brooklyn, and there are other logistics issues like paying the lighting and installation costs that will turn their 1911 chapel into what they hope will be an old-timey Coney Island carnival. So they’re looking to raise $17,500 in order to do all this, and are offering prizes ranging from Coney Island day passes to poster re-creations of ads for Mangels rides, even private tours of Green-Wood or Coney if you’ve got deep enough pockets. If you love Coney, love Green-Wood or you love old-timey historical titans, this seems like the perfect Kickstarter to shell out for.

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