Landmark Coney Island Childs' Being Renovated Into Amphitheater Stage

There's a moment in Kaufman and Hart's perennial comedy YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU, where it's mentioned that the Grand Duchess Olga Katrina, a member of Russian royalty, now lives in America after escaping the revolution and is working as a waitress at Childs'.

The line usually doesn't get much of a reaction nowadays, but when the play opened in 1936 it must have gotten howls.

Imagine a contemporary play where a member of an insanely wealthy family overseas escapes a revolt of the masses and is now flipping burgers at McDonald's and you'll get an idea of what the 80-year-old joke meant.

The term "fast food" hadn't entered American lexicon when the first Childs' opened in lower Manhattan in 1889, nor in 1917, when a large and popular Childs' opened on Surf Avenue on Coney Island. That Childs' is now the home of the Coney Island Museum and the famous Sideshows By The Seashore, but an additional Childs', build on the boardwalk in 1923 and abandoned for decades, is planned to be the focal point of a new 5,000 seat performance space and amphitheater.

"We're calling it a boutique amphitheater," says Julia Butler, a senior vice president of the developer iStar, tells the New York Times.

The new venue will be the only covered outdoor amphitheater in the metropolitan region, once a thick tent-like fabric is stretched over the trusses. The trusses will arch over the seats, which have a carefully chosen sand color, "not the bright blue or the red seats that you normally see in an amphitheater."

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