In Coney Island, Grand Dreams on the Far Edges

When the photographer Emily Berl visits a place for the first time, she said, she likes to go to its farthest edges, because she knows she will find something interesting happening there. In New York this instinct took her to Coney Island, the neighborhood defined by the two things it was not: the amusement park and the beach. “Thousands of people go to the amusement park and never walk the three blocks into the neighborhood,” she said. “There was just so much life there that I didn’t know existed.”