There really used to be a family’s house underneath a notorious Coney Island roller coaster

I always thought it was a gag helped along by trick camera work. In 1977’s Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, attributes his nervous personality to having grown up in a house “underneath the roller coaster in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn.” Turns out there really was such a house—not under the Cyclone but beneath a similar wooden coaster called the Thunderbolt. Built in 1925, it predated the Cyclone by two years. And while Allen didn’t live in the house, (his childhood territory was Midwood), it was occupied throughout the 20th century by George Moran, the man who commissioned the Thunderbolt, and his family descendants. The Thunderbolt house story begins in the Coney Island heyday of the 1890s. “The house was originally the Kensington Hotel, built in 1895, one of many boardwalk inns at the beach resort,” wrote Tim Donnelly in a 2013 New York Post article. “In 1925, George Moran bought the hotel and carried out a seemingly bizarre plan: constructing a ride…