PROMPT: For most of us today, leisure consists of private activities that rarely require public spaces. granted, there are trips to the baseball park, movie theaters, beach and hiking trips - but our recreational activities at home range far and wide: online networking, gaming, television, and socializing in our homes. Americans at the turn of the century had far fewer recreation and leisure choices in their homes.

The rapidly growing population in urban America sought forms of leisure in public spaces, including saloons, parks, dance-halls, and the novel sources for leisure, including the zoo, the museum, the public library, the sporting event, the theater, the circus, and the nickelodeon.

A central new institution of the new opportunities in public leisure and recreation was Brooklyn's Coney Island. The Coney Island History Project has produced a thorough and richly illustrated virtual walking tour on its website, numerous oral histories (in various languages), and countless photographs.

Choose ONE of the oral histories available from the Coney Island Oral History Archive. Introduce and summarize the story you heard. Also, please explain why you chose that story and how it relates to your understanding of leisure at the turn of the 20th century and today.

Guidelines for this assignment:

1. All writing is to be done in complete sentences with proper English grammar and mechanics. This includes, but is not limited to, proper nouns, subject/verb agreement, spelling,sentence construction, and punctuation.

2. Your response must answer the questions asked.

3. The reflection response you submit must be a minimum of 500 words. The word count should be included in your reflection response.

4. The response must be your original work. You may not copy from the internet, your text, or other students.