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The Mermaid parade is well-known for extraordinary marine costumes, and for the occasional partial nudity. (This is not as surprising as it may sound, because it is legal in New York State for women to be topless in public, as long as this is not part of a business venture.) The parade is however very much a family event; it is quite common for at least one little girl's birthday party to march as part of the parade. There are sections in the parade for vehicles of all kinds, for floats, for groups, and for individuals. Mermaids and sea creatures of every shape and size are represented, and the audience is festive and appreciative.

 

The Parade starts on West 10th Street and the Boardwalk, moves west to West 16th Street and the Boardwalk, then goes north to Surf Avenue and turns east along Surf Avenue and rolls to West 10th Street where it disbands.

 

Coney Island is a peninsula, formerly an island, in southernmost Brooklyn, New York City, USA, with a beach on the Atlantic Ocean. The neighborhood of the same name is a community of 60,000 people in the western part of the peninsula, with Seagate to its west; Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach to its east; and Gravesend to the north.

 

When the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company electrified the steam railroads and connected Brooklyn to Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge at the beginning of the 20th century, Coney Island turned rapidly from a resort to an accessible location for day-trippers seeking to escape the summer heat in New York City's tenements.

 

In Coney Island's lowest years there was some incremental improvement in relatively small areas, notably the preservation and later the expansion of what had been the rides area at the back of the Feltman's property as Astroland. The general improvement in New York City's infrastructure, commercial prospects and image after the 1970s fiscal crisis under the mayoral administration of Edward I. Koch helped Coney Island, and many improvements were made under the mayoralty of Rudolph Giuliani, continuing with his successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, helped by the Wall Street booms of the 1980s and 1990s, which brought considerable money to the City through financial industry taxes.

 

In 1964, Coney Island's last remaining large theme park, Steeplechase Park, closed. The rides were auctioned off, and the property was sold to developer Fred Trump, the father of Donald Trump. Trump, convinced that the amusement area would die off once the large theme parks were gone, wanted to build luxury apartments on the old Steeplechase property. He spent ten years battling in court to get the property rezoned. At one point Trump organized a funeral for amusement parks in Coney Island. Trump invited the press to the funeral where bikini-clad girls first handed out hot dogs, then handed out stones which Fred invited all to cast through the stained-glass windows of the pavilion. Then, pronouncing the amusement park dead, he had the pavilion bulldozed. After a decade of court battles, Trump exhausted all his legal options and the property was still zoned only for amusements. He eventually leased the property to Norman Kaufman, who ran a small collection of fairground amusements on a corner of the site calling his amusement park "Steeplechase Park".

 

In January 2007 Thor released renderings for a new amusement park to be built on the Astroland site called Coney Island Park.

Critics pointed out that even though Thor claimed its project would expand the amusement area, the company had already evicted several acres of amusements from the property it bought and planned to evict the rest of the amusements on the property after the 2007 season, as well as close Astroland.

 

 

 

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