BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Updated Wed., Nov. 25: A piece of historic Coney Island lives on in Little Italy, where gallery owner Allan Reiver has an original, working Mangels shooting gallery from the early 20th century.
Reiver, 73, who owns the Elizabeth St. Gallery, at 209 Elizabeth St., hunted down the hidden shooting gallery on Stillwell Ave., near Surf Ave., on the street where the Nathan’s hot dog shop is located.
The attraction had been boarded up in the 1930s — “when weapons were outlawed in New York City or shooting galleries were curbed,” Reiver thinks — and was actually hidden behind a basketball hoop-shooting concession.
Allan Reiver in front of his original Mangels Coney Island shooting gallery.
It turned out that the basketball game’s operator — who had previously repeatedly denied to Reiver that the shooting gallery was still there — was actually “living” in it, inhabiting the space between the two amusements.
“It was his living room,” Reiver said.
There was a switch for the shooting gallery, and when Reiver flicked it on, the old attraction sprung to life in “perfect working condition.”
The Little Italy gallery owner said the vintage shooting gallery had used .22-caliber short rifles — which were on chains — that shot bullets with “a very soft lead shield,” so that when they hit the target, they turned to powder. In fact, Reiver said, lead powder 3 feet deep was piled up at the base of the machine, and he had to clean it carefully with alcohol to make it safe to handle.
He bought the contraption the same day and moved it to his loft on Elizabeth St. When he later relocated to a building across the street where his gallery is today, he installed the shooting gallery there.
In the late 1800s, William F. Mangels, a young German immigrant, opened a factory blocks from the beach where he created carousels and other amusement rides, along with his renowned shooting galleries. Known as the “Father of Amusement Rides,” he held a patent on the mechanism that made carousel horses go up and down to “gallop.” Mangels lived on Ocean Parkway near Coney Island, and today lies buried in Greenwood Cemetery.
Reiver, in fact, claims his is the only intact, original Mangels shooting gallery in the country. Many of them were disassembled and their parts sold off individually as collector’s items.
“I don’t know of another one that’s in working condition in America — especially not in original working condition,” he said. “If there’s one out there, it’s probably laying in parts and pieces in a garage somewhere. This one’s in totally original condition, I’ve done nothing to it.”
The objects in his Mangels shooting gallery include a lion, a stag, a whale, a tank, battleships, an Indian in a canoe (reflective of that time’s accepted racism against Native Americans), pipes on the arms of a spinning windmill and racks of doves. Shooters could also aim at symbols of playing card suits — clubs, diamonds, hearts or spades — as they spun on a wheel, or at a swinging target, inside of which was a pan that loudly clanged when hit.
When running, the aged machine, with its grinding metal gears and moving chain-link belts, sounds a bit like a subway train — and apparently sucks up a lot of electricity. As Reiver was recently giving The Villager a demonstration, he said, “I should turn it off in a few minutes.”
A couple of years ago, the Coney Island USA Museum unveiled a restored, working 1940s Mangels shooting gallery.
Reiver said that, at one point, he had offered his shooting gallery to the museum, but they felt the ’40s one they had “would suffice for their purposes.”
He also said he believes his is older, dating from “sometime after the turn of the century.”
The diverse objects in Reiver’s one also move at the original speed, whereas video of the Coney Island museum’s shooting gallery — whose targets are mainly soldiers and tanks — seems to show it moving considerably faster.
However, Dick Zigun, the unofficial Mayor of Coney Island and the producer of the annual Mermaid Parade, claimed Reiver’s statements were “off target.”
“There are four operating Mangels shooting galleries in the U.S.A. — ours, two at Knobels [sic], a Midwestern bar,” he said, obviously including Reiver’s in that number.
“Our Coney Island Museum was never interested in purchasing his,” he added.
Finally, he said of the museum’s Mangels attraction, “Ours runs at the correct speed.”
An Internet search for a Knobels bar instead yielded Knoebels Amusement Resort in Elysberg, Pennsylvania.
Dick Knoebels told The Villager, “Yes, we do have an intact Mangels shooting gallery. We also have a 15-car Mangels Whip ride, a Mangels Kiddie Whip and Mangels boats and pony cart. We have a lot of Mangels stuff.”
Harris Falk, a board member at Coney Island USA, said the Midwestern bar with a Mangels shooting gallery is actually the Sandy Chanty seafood restaurant, in Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio. Indeed, a shooting gallery was found there and rebuilt to working condition in 2004.
Zigun later added that there, in fact, may even be a couple more of the old-school amusements out there, that the Doris Duke estate sold one about a decade ago and that there is one at the National Gun Museum, in Washington, D.C.
At any rate, although Reiver claims he offered his shooting gallery to the Coney Island Museum before, he now says he doesn’t think he could bring himself to part with it.
A brief video of Reiver’s original Mangels Coney Island shooting gallery:
