Flea market stalls line one side of the avenue, along with a Russian-owned furniture store with its name in English and Cyrillic lettering. Coney Island is not an island. On a map, it looks like the base holding up the vaguely teapot-shaped and very busy borough of Brooklyn. Coney's sands are part of the longest continuous public beach on the Atlantic seaboard, 3.5 miles stretching eastward from Coney to Brighton Beach to Manhattan Beach. The beach itself is remarkably clean, with the benevolent atmosphere of good things that happen to be free.
People cast fishing lines off the jagged black rocks of the slim jetties.
One of the jewels of the renewed Coney is the New York Aquarium, regarded as one of the country's best. Both the aquarium's indoor and outdoor exhibits are enchanting, attractive and inventive, and make for an ideal family outing. Don't miss the spectacle of dolphins at feeding time, when the animals propel themselves vertically out of the water, shake fins to hands with the trainers and whirl around on command, splashing everything in sight in the process, including the giddy spectators. The aquarium draws 780,000 visitors a year. Not quite a quarter-million came last season to Deno's Wonder Wheel Park, but that's still a decent crowd.