Beyoncé bumped her ass off there. You can, too

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The only way to know if Coney Island’s Eldorado Auto Skooter is actually open is to walk by on Surf Avenue, where the bumper car attraction has sat between the boardwalk and the neighborhood’s subway station since 1973.

Hours are decided day-to-day by its owner, Gordon Lee, 61, who considers the number of clouds in the sky, or the day of the week, or whether the kids are in school. Eldorado has no website, and the hours posted online promise nothing.

“We really don’t have hours posted because it all depends on the weather and having people there,” he told The City Reporter. “I don’t want people to feel we’re going to be open every day.”

Wedged between its lit-up marquee are two signs featuring donkeys showing off their rear ends, beckoning passersby to “bump your ass off.” Those who choose to answer their call can ride the sonic waves of 1970s disco New York just a block away from the Atlantic, cruising inside tiny electric vehicles named after — but hardly resembling — the classic Cadillac model.

Lee, who also runs Sunstar Vending, his wife’s family business installing and repairing arcade games, speaks with the dropped vowels of a Brooklyn native, born in Sheepshead Bay since his family immigrated from Hong Kong.

“This was my first pet project,” he said about Eldorado. “It’s just a ride if you think about it, but it’s the ambience all around it — the lighting, the music, the other people around there.”

Production crews have come there to capture the visual magic of the bumper car disco, like in the Beyoncé music video for “XO” — in which the pop legend whirls around the floor in a tiny mechanical car — and the television series Mr. Robot, where the rink serves as the secret hideout of a hacker group.

Ten dollars buys a frenetic four-minute thrill ride on the silver floor of the bumper car rink. There, you’ll find Louis Beard, 56, sometimes giving neighborhood kids free rides.

“The local people, they suffer. These people have nothing,” Beard said. “It hurts me because they live down the street.”

A Park Slope native with bulging muscles, Beard has helped manage Eldorado for over a decade, overseeing the cars and helming its last-of-its-kind sound system from the golden age of disco.

“I love this atmosphere. I do,” he said. “I love the people that come here.”

Lee also rents out the rink for parties, and DJs make the trek to Coney Island for a chance to play on a legendary sound system. Former Studio 54 resident DJ Nicky Siano threw his 60th birthday party there in 2015.

Inside a bumper car, the sticky boardwalk heat is replaced by the flow of cool air circulating and rainbow strobe lights glittering the darkened walls. If Beard knows and likes someone, he tells them to get into a purple car that has a secret known only by the staff. It has a souped-up motor from Germany, installed after its original one died, that roars ahead of — or into — the other cars, all of them attached to the livewire ceiling that powers them.

After the action is done, adults and kids woozy from the ride spill out into an arcade and another collection of flashing lights and overlapping sounds.

A disco mirror 

Perhaps the most visceral effect of the Coney Island attraction comes from its sound system — a relic of New York’s disco past flowing over riders as they spin ‘round and ‘round, always turning left, inside the blue, red and purple cars — feeling the music vibrate in their chests.

Lee bought the place in 2012 from its original owners, the Fitlin family, who replaced what had been a restaurant with the rink. They retired after the death of their son, Scott Fitlin, the man responsible for Eldorado’s stellar audio.

Scott was a Coney Island baby, raised on the boardwalk, where he got hooked on dance music watching people boogie to the beats pouring out of amusement rides, he later wrote on a Coney Island message board.

“I run a disco on wheels,” Scott said. “The only difference between my place and a club, is that in a club you dance on the floor, in my place you drive electric cars around the floor.”

Scott grew up tinkering with Eldorado’s sound system, eventually recruiting Richard Long, the sound designer who installed custom systems at bygone clubs like Studio 54 and Paradise Garage, according to DJ Mag.

Long, who died from AIDS in 1984, came down to Coney Island and installed his custom-built features in the system at the bumper car place and arcade. Disco clubs largely shut down in the 1980s, unlike Eldorado, which now boasts Long’s only remaining system in New York City.

These days, the music depends on who’s riding the bumper cars at any given time.

“Got a bunch of Jamaican guys out there, I’m gonna play some reggae. Got a bunch of Spanish people out there, I’m gonna play some Spanish music in there,” Beard said. He also has special songs downloaded from YouTube for when Orthodox Jewish families arrive.

“We try to cater to the customers to make them feel comfortable,” Lee said. According to him, it’s “the sound, the feel, the air” that makes the Eldorado experience special. “The thrill and the ability to be free and feel that wind in your face.”

A hurricane and a plague 

Months after Lee purchased the place, Superstorm Sandy ravagedConey Island. The rising water submerged the arcade’s claw games and skee-ball machines as it gushed out of the toilet and sinks. Bumper cars bobbed in the flood.

“I took a turnkey business,” Lee said. “And then I had nothing. All zero.”

He rebuilt, he said, with the help of Beard and others, who replaced the walls and repaired the bumper cars — although their headlights have not functioned since then.

Eight years later, another catastrophe hit with COVID-19. Lee lost a full summer season of income due to pandemic restrictions, and since then his expenses have gone up even as he says the neighborhood’s vibrancy has diminished.

“We just notice that they’re missing,” Lee said about the number of visitors, adding a grim recent example.

“For example, the Latino crowd is not there anymore, and we know why — they are concerned, and they don’t come.”

According to Coney Island’s Economic Development Corporation, the neighborhood still draws crowds to its shore. It was the most visited city beach in 2024 with nearly five million visitors, according to the corporation’s most recent report, and roughly an equal number of businesses have opened and closed in the past year in Coney Island, better than the citywide turnover rate.

But locals said the number of visitors to the free beach does not translate into patrons for boardwalk businesses, and Coney Island is simply not what it used to be.

Dennis Corines, who owned and operated Denny’s Ice Cream for 37 years until Superstorm Sandy, has watched the neighborhood change over his decades on the boardwalk.

“There used to be no room on the sidewalk. You had to walk in the street,” he said, sprawled out on a chair inside a different ice cream shop next door to Eldorado on a hot day in May.

His diagnosis of why Coney Island is no longer drawing such crowds? Everything is too expensive.

“You come down here with your husband and two kids and you ain’t got five, six hundred in your pocket, don’t even come here,” he said.

Lee, though, isn’t ready to give up his carnival call just yet.

“Come,” he said. “Come bump your ass off.”