By Jared Ebersole in Video 30 Jul 2026

How Engineers Restored a Ride That Will Never Run Again

Restoring Coney Island's Parachute Jump meant dismantling parts of a 262-foot steel landmark because wrapping it for paint removal could turn it into a giant sail.

The Parachute Jump has not carried a passenger in more than 60 years.

New York still spent millions of dollars taking care of it.

That makes sense once you stand on the Coney Island Boardwalk. The 262-foot steel tower is no longer useful as a ride, but it has become useful as something else: a landmark that can identify Coney Island from miles away.

Preserving it required solving a strange engineering problem. The tower survives ocean winds because air passes through its open lattice. Cover that lattice to remove old paint, and the structure begins behaving like a sail.

Where it is

Riegelmann Boardwalk at West 19th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11224

The Parachute Jump was built for the 1939–40 New York World's Fair in Queens. Riders sat beneath parachutes that were lifted to the top of the tower, released, and guided down by cables. Unlike a free-fall ride, the descent was controlled by the open parachute and the ride's mechanical system.

After the fair, the structure was moved to Steeplechase Park in Coney Island. It reopened there in 1941 and became part of the dense amusement skyline alongside roller coasters, towers, signs, and rides competing for attention from the beach.

The Jump stopped operating in 1964.

Steeplechase closed soon afterward, and most of the park disappeared. The tower remained, not because it had a new job, but because demolition never quite won. It was designated a New York City landmark in 1977 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

Landmark status protected the idea of the Parachute Jump. It did not protect its steel from salt.

Ocean air is relentless. Moisture and chlorides attack coatings and accelerate corrosion. Once paint fails, exposed steel begins losing material. The tower's height, geometry, and location make even routine maintenance unusually difficult.

By the early 2000s, the city undertook a major stabilization and repainting project. The visible task sounded ordinary: remove deteriorated coatings, repair steel, and apply a new protective paint system.

The old coating contained lead, so it could not simply be blasted off into the neighborhood and beach. Abrasive blasting had to happen inside containment.

Containment changed the wind problem.

The open truss normally allows air to flow through. Fabric wrapped around it creates a broad surface that catches wind. At 262 feet beside the Atlantic Ocean, that added wind load was not a minor construction inconvenience. A repair system intended to preserve the tower could place forces on it that the uncovered structure never experienced.

Engineers therefore had to treat the restoration as a problem of temporary states.

A complete tower has a known load path. A tower with members or upper sections removed may behave differently. The sequence matters: which steel comes off first, what remains braced, where loads travel at every stage, and what happens if severe weather arrives before the structure is whole again.

Sections were lowered so coating removal and repair could happen closer to the ground under controlled containment. Damaged steel could be replaced, connections examined, and the protective system applied without wrapping the entire tower into one enormous wind-catching surface.

Then the pieces went back up.

The restoration cost roughly $5 million. It did not return the parachutes, rebuild the operating machinery, or reopen the ride. It preserved the steel silhouette.

That distinction matters. Historic preservation is not always about restoring an object to its original use. Sometimes the use has become impractical, unsafe, or unnecessary, while the object has acquired cultural value independent of its machinery.

Today the Parachute Jump works as a beacon. Lighting added to the structure turns it into a programmable nighttime landmark. It anchors the boardwalk and carries the memory of Steeplechase Park even though almost everything that once surrounded it is gone.

The structure was engineered to lift people and bring them down.

Its hardest ride turned out to be surviving after it stopped.