The Jewish Center Brighton Beach, also known as the Jewish Center of Coney Island, is a synagogue, school, and community center. The building was constructed between 1929 and 1931 in the Renaissance Revival style. The facade is ornamented in gold colored stone and prominently features a grand staircase and loggia on the second story. The construction of the center came at a time after Brighton Beach's heyday - when lavish amusement parks were razed, and the southern edge of Brooklyn became a middle-class residential neighborhood. The demographic was heavily Jewish, comprised of New Yorkers who had moved in with relatives following the crash of 1929 and immigrants fleeing Europe and Hitler's increasingly anti-Semitic policies. The Jewish Center was one of the first synagogues in the neighborhood. Its combined programmatic use: a school, a community center, and place of worship was a reflection of the needs of the Jewish community at Brighton Beach. The new type of facility provided aid to the newly arrived and disadvantaged members of the community. This development of synagogue architecture is distinctly American, the center being a space where traditionally separate institutions were combined.

Hotel Ricadonna, ca.1900.

Tracks on what would later become the BRT (and later BMT) Brighton Beach Line, July 12, 1916. The Brighton Beach Line opened in 1878, providing service from Prospect Park to Brighton Beach at Coney Island Avenue, near the recently-opened Brighton Beach Hotel. In 1917, the line was extended west toward the Culver Depot, taking over existing trolley tracks. Today, the line runs on elevated tracks over Brighton Beach Avenue. In this view from July 1916, the Brighton Beach Station — then the terminus of the Brighton Beach Line — is visible at center, in the distance. At right is the Chase Through the Clouds roller coaster, built in 1910 by the Giant Safety Racing Company. The surrounding amusement park burned in a 1919 fire, but parts of the coaster were salvaged and relocated to Coney Island’s Luna Park.

Hotel Riccadonna, ca. 1910. In 1904 a hotel was constructed on the corner of Ocean Parkway and Sea Breeze Avenue. It was a three-story wood framed building called the Shelbourne. The hotel had 150 guest rooms, 65 bathrooms and a phone in every room (quite a feature in the early 20th century). In 1906 the hotel became the Riccadonna, named for a family whose patriarch Abele Riccadonna, an Italian immigrant, had become a successful caterer and restaurant owner in the the 1890s in Manhattan. The hotel catered to the moneyed classes that had been the early visitors to Coney Island. (It was a latecomer to that world, as by 1905-1910 the atmosphere of Coney Island was becoming more working class and amusement park based.) In 1909 the hotel, already quite grand, was enlarged considerably. The additions included 50 more guest rooms and all new dining rooms, parlors, smoking, and billiard rooms. There are conflicting stories about the changing of ownership in 1910-1911 and the last years of the building, but it is not hard to imagine that it would have declined and been demolished along with the other grand hotels and resorts in the late 1910s and 1920s. Today a large condominium building occupies the site.

Hotel Shelburne ca. 1913 Ocean Parkway terminated here at Seabreeze Avenue, where the Hotel Shelburne catered to Coney Island's seasonal visitors. Built originally as the boxy Parkway Baths Hotel, allegedly in thirty days, the hotel added its many balconies and gaudy signs later, co-opting the image of the major amusement parks opening around it- Steeplechase Park (1897), Luna Park (1903) and Dreamland (1904).

The Brighton Beach Race Course opened in 1879 by the Brighton Beach Racing Association. The track was an American Thoroughbred horse racing facility headed by the owner of the Brighton Beach Hotel, William A. Engeman. The sand-covered track instantly attracted the New York elite. It even hosted harness racing events - a form of horse racing popular in Europe in which horses at a particular stride pull their jockey in a two-wheeled cart. Though the track was highly successful, the 1908 Hart-Agnew law which banned gambling caused it to it fall out of favor. The facilities were converted into a motordrome for auto racing for a short time. Eventually, the grandstand and track were razed to be replaced by apartment buildings in the 1920s.