Deno’s Wonder Wheel, a 15-story signature
feature of the Coney Island skyline, first
spun to life in the wake of the Spanish flu
pandemic a century ago. Now, as the coro-
navirus casts a growing pall over the stor-
ied amusement district, the family that
owns the wheel says the whirling behemoth
will almost certainly go the entire season
without carrying passengers for the first
time in a hundred summers.
An ingenious Ferris wheel and roller
coaster hybrid built by Italian, Irish and
Russian immigrants three years before the
construction of the boardwalk its park ad-
joins, the Wonder Wheel was the jewel of
the showy, boomtown Coney Island that
rose along the newly widened beach in the
Roaring Twenties. And it is the oldest sur-
viving ride to operate continually there.
But a grand centennial celebration of the
Brooklyn landmark has been put on indefi-
nite hold as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s
phased reopening of New York State’s econ-
omy has kept amusement parks shuttered
during crucial warm-weather months they
rely on for their income.
On a recent sun-dazzled afternoon, the
great, steel-spoked wheel cast crisscrossed
shadows across the ghost town of Deno’s
Wonder Wheel Park, an eclectic jumble of
rides that is normally thronged in summer.
Jorge Gallegos, who is known as Chico,
spray-painted the skeletons atop the Spook-
A-Rama ride in preparation for visitors.
Reggie Pryor greased the bumper cars.
“Trying to keep busy,” he said. “Getting
everything ready, in case we open.”
But by early August, with no definitive
word from the state on if or when amuse-
ment parks might be permitted to operate
this year, optimism about a possible reopen-
ing was hard to muster.
“We haven’t given up hope, but it doesn’t
seem likely,” said Dennis Vourderis, whose
family has owned and operated the Wonder
Wheel since 1983. “It’s very sad and finan-
cially devastating. To us as a seasonal oper-
ator on the boardwalk in Brooklyn, Aug. 15
would be much too late to open for the sea-
son.”
The pandemic couldn’t have hit the Vour-
derises at a worse time, as the close-knit
family paid $5.5 million last year to expand
their park westward into a lot along West
12th Street and another $6 million to com-
mission a splashy new European thrill ride
of an undisclosed type.
“The property we bought next door is in
jeopardy,” Mr. Vourderis said. “It makes me
realize how fragile we are.”
Denos Vourderis, Dennis’s father and the
clan’s patriarch, first had designs on the
Wonder Wheel back in 1948, according to
family lore. A Greek immigrant who ped-
dled hot dogs from a pushcart, the elder Mr.
Vourderis proposed to his future wife, Lula,
with a grandiose promise: “You marry me, I
buy you the Wonder Wheel.” In 1983, after
35 years running increasingly large food
businesses, he made good on his promise,
purchasing her the biggest ring of all.
The entire story of the Wonder Wheel is
one of immigrant gumption, as the author
Charles Denson observes in “Coney Is-
land’s Wonder Wheel Park,” a rollicking his-
tory that is being published this month by
Arcadia. Enlivened with vivid photographs
and diagrams, the book presents original
research on the enterprising immigrants
“with little formal education” who designed,
built, ran and ultimately rescued the com-
plex 200-ton machine.
“Coney Island was a place where immi-
grants could realize a dream,” Mr. Denson,
the executive director of the Coney Island
History Project, said in an interview. “It
was pretty much a laboratory for inven-
tion.”
The Wonder Wheel was the brain child of
Charles Hermann, a native of Romania’s
Transylvanian Alps, who immigrated to the
United States in 1907 after being trained as
a machinist. Mr. Hermann, who spelled his
last name two ways — sometimes with two
‘r’s — was an inveterate tinkerer who came
to hold multiple patents, including one that
his granddaughter, Freddi Herrmann, de-
scribed in an interview as a “cowcatcher for
cars that would push people away instead of
running them over.”
Fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci’s draw-
ings of a perpetual motion machine, Mr.
Hermann designed and received a patent
for his own, “an eccentric Ferris wheel”
with cars that rolled onto a platform to dis-
gorge and admit passengers before rolling
back onto the wheel. While working as a
custodian at an apartment house in Wash-
ington Heights, Mr. Hermann met and
formed a partnership with a tenant named
Herman Garms, a German immigrant with
a head for business.
Mr. Garms persuaded Mr. Hermann to re-
design the machine as an amusement ride
they called Dip the Dip — the future Wonder
Wheel — and William J. Ward, a prominent
Coney Island landowner, provided a lot on
Jones Walk in exchange for a stake in the
venture.
“So you have these two uneducated immi-
grants who wanted to achieve something,”
Mr. Denson said, “and they built this mag-
nificent machine that’s really a work of art.”
Though Mr. Garms had no financial train-
ing, he sold stock to family and local busi-ness owners and resisted union interfer-
ence by bringing steelworkers into the com-
pany as shareholders. The result, Mr. Den-
son said, was “the most successful business
in Coney Island.”
Mr. Hermann, a dreamer who cared noth-
ing for money, sold all his shares in the
wheel to raise money to help realize his vi-sion. Without ever earning a dime from his
invention, he moved on.
The Garms family ran the Wonder Wheel
for six decades, spending summers in a
home beneath the spinning ride, much like
the family in the Woody Allen film “Annie
Hall” that lived below a rumbling roller
coaster.
Freddie Garms, one of Mr. Garms’s sons,
was the very model of the Coney carny, pro-
moting the wheel by surfing the tops of its
swinging cars untethered and adorning the
ride with its signature neon. A Scotch en-
thusiast, he was buried with a bottle of
Chivas Regal and a mink bow tie, according
to Walter Kerner Jr., whose father co-owned
the wheel in the 1970s and early ’80s.
“To avoid problems with the Mafia, they
hired off-duty officers to work the wheel,”
the younger Mr. Kerner said. “Some worked
more than others, but their presence kept
the Mafia out.”
Coney Island fell on hard times after
Steeplechase Park closed in 1964, but Won-
der Wheel Park was protected at night by a
pair of German shepherds, one at the base
of the wheel and one on the roof of an adja-
cent building. In the morning, the wheel op-
erator would stop the ride with one of the
cars alongside the roof, and the guard dog
knew to get in, as did its four-legged compa-
triot on the ground. The car had food and
water, and the dogs just rode around togeth-
er all day.
In 1983, Freddie Garms offered to sell the
Wonder Wheel to Denos Vourderis, who
had previously bought the adjoining kiddie
park. Coney Island was blighted by this
time, and a homeless man stabbed the Vour-
deris patriarch in the chest with a screw-driver. As he was recovering, his children
visited him in the hospital and tried to talk
him out of buying the wheel.
Their father would have none of it. “He
said: ‘I got guts. You got no guts; tell him I
want to buy it,’ ” Dennis Vourderis remem-
bered. The family bought the ride for
$250,000.
The task of restoring the dilapidated
wheel was daunting, and the only mainte-
nance instructions had been scrawled on
the back of a cardboard cigarette carton,
ending with the words “Good Luck.”
One of the more frightening challenges
came after the Vourderises’ first season op-
erating the ride, when the previous owner
informed them they needed to lift the gar-
gantuan wheel off its axle to replace some
worn steel rollers.
“You ever put your car on a jack and you
worry your jack will give out?” asked Steve
Vourderis, Dennis’s brother. “Well, this is a
150-foot-tall, 200-ton wheel up in the air, and
you’re up there 75 feet in the air working on
it, worrying the whole thing could come
down.”
In the end, the Vourderises completed a
handsome restoration of their prize pos-
session. The wheel was designated a city
landmark in 1989, and it has been spinning
every summer since — until this year. But
even as the financial math becomes more
vexing with each week the park remains
closed, the family has not abandoned hope
for the long term.
“If there’s one thing I learned from my
dad, it’s that I have faith in Coney Island,
and I know it’ll come back,” Dennis Vour-
deris said. “So I kind of grew some guts — as
well as a gut, from being in quarantine.”It’s a Wonder, but You
Can’t Hop On for a Spin
STREETSCAPESBy JOHN FREEMAN GILLThe pandemic has halted a
Coney Island feature that was
to celebrate its centennial.
Top, the brothers Steve, left,
and Dennis Vourderis near the
Wonder Wheel, which their
family owns in Coney Island.
Above, the area and the
towering Wheel in the
mid-1930s.KARSTEN MORAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESGETTY IMAGES10 REMB THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2020Following the lead of other real estate bro-
kerage communities around the country,
several industry groups in New York are
planning to eliminate the term “master bed-
room” from floor plan descriptions and con-
versations between real estate agents and
clients.
The Real Estate Board of New York plans
to vote soon on removing the phrase from
its residential listings service, the online
platform that organizes listings data from
brokerages around the city. While most peo-
ple searching for a new place to live don’t
use the site directly, the update is influential
since brokerages rely on the service.
Sandhya Espitia, the chief operating offi-
cer of the real estate board, said its resi-
dential board of directors, which would
make the decision, has been engaged in
“deep conversation” over the last month
while also researching similar changes in
listing services around the country. It is “as-
sessing what meaningful steps should be
put in place to bring greater diversity and
inclusion to the industry,” Ms. Espitia said.
The push to stop using the term “master
bedroom” comes in the wake of George
Floyd’s death and the resulting Black Lives
Matter protests, and as the industry grap-
ples with issues of housing discrimination
and diversity within its ranks. The origins of
the term are unclear, but some brokers
nonetheless find it offensive and inappro-
priate.
The Houston Association of Realtors was
the first industry group to decide to stop us-
ing “master bedroom” in late June, after
some members expressed concerns that it
could be perceived as racist or sexist. In-
stead, Houston’s multiple listing service
now uses “primary” to describe the largest
bedroom and bathroom in a listing. Unlike
New York, where renters and buyers tend
to use brokerage websites and StreetEasy
.com to search for homes, the Houston
group’s website is the main place where
renters and home buyers go to view new
listings.
While some Houston agents praised the
change, some critics thought the move was
shortsighted. Even the singer John Legend
chimed in, arguing in a tweet that the “real
problem” with real estate has nothing to do
with semantics. Instead, he said brokers
should work to end housing discrimination
in the United States by showing all Black
people fair and equal treatment throughout
the buying and selling process.
Tanna Young, a real estate agent with
Southern Star Realty in Houston, said she
believed that the word “master” evoked im-
ages of pre-Civil War plantation life. “Espe-
cially as an African-American Realtor, it al-
ways sits in the back of my mind,” she said.
“More work needs to be done, we under-
stand that, but I’m happy that steps are be-
ing taken in that direction for change to be-
gin. Baby steps can lead to bigger steps.”
The U.S. Department of Housing and Ur-
ban Development determined in 1995 that
“master bedroom” was not discriminatory
and that it did not violate fair housing laws,
which is largely why the National Associa-
tion of Realtors hasn’t created a policy re-
garding its usage. The national organiza-
tion’s president, Vince Malta, said in a state-
ment in June that there was no reason that
real estate professionals could not use the
term since there was no evidence of its his-
torical connection to slavery.
But other industry groups and broker-
ages across the country have followed the
Houston association’s lead. The Real EstateStandards Organization recently decided to
replace “master” with “primary” in its Data
Dictionary, a universal language system
that keeps the industry consistent across
digital platforms. The institution recom-
mended that its members — a group of real
estate associations, tech-based companies
like Zillow and brokerages like Douglas Elli-
man and Compass — update their websites
as well.
The New York Residential Agent Contin-
uum also recommended that its members
rethink the phrase, along with replacing
other terms like “shared” for “His and
Hers” bathrooms and “non-elevator” for
“walk-up” building. Heather McDonough
Domi, a broker with Compass and a co-
founder of the group, said it was also push-ing to address these issues in continuing ed-
ucation courses for brokers.
Tom Postilio and Mickey Conlon, partner
agents with Douglas Elliman in Manhattan,
decided to make the change recently after
reviewing a set of floor plans, realizing that
“master bedroom” suddenly felt strange to
say.
“The first thing we did was Google the
phrase and expect to find some dark history
of why it was called ‘master bedroom,’ ” Mr.
Conlon said. “But no, it’s a marketing term.”
The first recorded usage of “master bed-
room” seems to have been in a 1926 Modern
Homes catalog by Sears, Roebuck and Co.
The pamphlet offered potential buyers a kit
they could use to build their own homes. A
“master’s bedroom” was cited in the sec-
ond-floor description of the most expensive
home in the catalog, but not in the floor plan
itself. Before this reference, most floor
plans used the word “chamber” when refer-
ring to bedrooms.
“It seems to me the term is coming more
out of a commercial orientation than a pro-
fessional one,” said Thomas Mellins, an ar-
chitectural historian. He guessed that Sears
might have introduced it as a way to attract
aspirational suburban home buyers who
aimed to be viewed as part of the expanding
middle class after World War I.
“Words matter,” Mr. Postilio said, “and
this is a small change we can effect immedi-
ately in the work that we do every day. It’s a
socially conscious choice we’re making.”It May Be Time to Retire the ‘Master Bedroom’
By SYDNEY FRANKLIN
A term’s undertones
cause people to rethink
industry jargon.Real estate professionals are
considering banning use of the
term “master bedroom” after a
realty group in Houston opened
a conversation about its
appropriateness.UDOR ROTHENKO FOR H5 PROPERTY