Wish you were here

Postcards were the social media of the 20th century. They were short and pithy, widely available and affordable, sometimes frivolous and often impermanent. During its heyday in the early 1900s, New York amusement park destination Coney Island regularly attracted crowds of more than 100,000 people a day. On any given weekend, that crowd would routinely send more than a quarter of a million postcards to family and friends, and, on just one single day in 1906, the Coney Island Post Office processed more than 200,000 postcards.