Very soon this low-down, grubby, greasy end-of-earth place will be lost, hardened into a simulacrum of itself. The Nathan’s sign will stay because every mall brand needs a flagship, but the chaos and the danger of the Warriors’ home turf will evaporate once and for all. And with it, the last spark of 1977 New York will go out. But of course it’s silly to mourn it. Coney was always a simulacrum, fake in a way that is absolutely innocent.

We like to watch the sea sky turn gray and the bodies shuffle off the beach toward the leathery men drinking foot-tall daiquiris. Every time we’ve come, we’ve seen Marilyn Monroe as a 60-year-old tranny dancing to the jukebox behind Ruby’s deep fryer. We once saw a Puerto Rican father leave his family at the table eating mozzarella sticks to ask her to dance to the Righteous Brothers. -KH