Gloria Nicholson

Gloria Nicholson was born in Coney Island in 1940 and grew up in a rooming house that her mother Josephine Boyce managed on Jones Walk and the Bowery. It overlooked the Virginia Reel and Wonder Wheel, which she often rode.  During the summer her father Sakuzo "Tish" Tashiro managed a scooter ride owned by the Handwerkers and located next to Nathan's.  "I should tell you that my father was Japanese. Pure Japanese. And my mother was French Canadian. So there's quite a combination there," Nicholson says.  "I think they met in one of the hotels where my mother was a waitress and my father at the time was a cook." She reminisces about unusual attractions and the cast of characters who populated her childhood including Ned Tilyou, Tirza's Wine Baths, Shatzkin's Knishes, the Shark Lady, and fortune-telling myna birds.

Gloria Nicholson passed away on April 25, 2023 at the age of 82.