Photographer Harvey Stein was a child when he first visited Coney Island with his parents in the late 1950s. To his eyes the beachfront sliver of Brooklyn, New York, was a bustling, colorful, and terrifying place. He saw sailors fighting and rode on the Parachute Jump, a vertiginous amusement that afforded passengers a lofty view of the boardwalk. Stein longed to return, but he wouldn’t until 1970, when he came back with a camera. Coney Island had changed by then, its famed attractions demolished or decaying, its whimsical skyline of carnival architecture dwarfed by the looming towers of low-income public housing. But it was here that he found an endlessly diverse array of people. They were “young, old, skinny, fat, beautiful, ugly, white, brown, black, and on and on.” Strangers were unusually friendly and didn’t mind being photographed.