Inside the box at left (close-up) is a memorial to Jeffrey Martinez.

(Fangz is someone else. "—R.I.P— FANGZ" was painted before Mr. Martinez died.)

Not Ray's — fittingly, not the first time someone's come up with that joke.

The placard above, part of Charles Denson's Coney Island Creekwalk, offers some information about the many boat carcasses lurking in the waters of Coney Island Creek, a few of which can be seen in the background of this photo. (A close inspection of aerial images reveals, by my count, around three dozen decaying vessels in the creek.) The most famous of the wrecks, which gets its own placard from Mr. Denson, is the Quester I (more info), a.k.a. the Yellow Submarine, built between 1966 and 1970 by a local man named Jerry Bianco who dreamed of using the sub to raise the Andrea Doria and recover all of the sunken ocean liner's treasures. The Quester I is visible above on the right side of the photo, its yellow conning tower set against the dark hulk of the rotting barge that lies right behind it. Here's a closer look.

Coney Island's Mark Twain Intermediate School (formerly Mark Twain Junior High School), a selective magnet school for gifted and talented students, is one of the city's top middle schools. Until 2008, it admitted students under a racial quota system mandated by a 1974 federal court ruling (this ruling also dictated that Mark Twain become a magnet school in the first place). But the quotas weren't part of an affirmative action program — they were originally intended to increase the number of white students at what had been a segregated school. Over the years, however, as the demographics of the school district shifted, the quotas had some unintended consequences. An NY Times article from February 2008 explains:

The original court order for Mark Twain Intermediate School was imposed when the region, District 21, was overwhelmingly white. The court held that the local school board was deliberately segregating that school by sending middle class white students elsewhere. The court ruled that the school should not have more than 10 percent more minority students than the districtwide average, which was about 30 percent.

Over time, however, the neighborhood has changed and the proportion of white students has steadily decreased in the area’s middle schools, down to roughly 40 percent in 2007.

As a result, the court order has ended up leading Mark Twain, now a respected program for gifted students, to require higher scores on admissions tests for minority students than for white students. . . .

The parents of Nikita Rau, an 11-year-old whose family immigrated from India, filed a class action lawsuit last month against the Department of Education after Mark Twain rejected her last year. She scored a 79 on the school’s music admissions test — below the 84.4 required for minority students to be accepted, but above the 77 for white students.

Operation Blessing, founded by good ol' Pat Robertson

From left to right, the most prominent features are the Verrazano Bridge, the Brooklyn VA hospital, the Bay Ridge Towers, One World Trade Center and the skyline of Lower Manhattan, the Empire State Building, 432 Park Avenue, and a seagull. Here's a closer look.

This lighthouse at the western tip of Coney Island, in what is now the gated community of Sea Gate, was built in 1890. In 2003, the final lighthouse keeper to serve here, Frank Schubert (photos), passed away at the age of 88 in the adjacent cottage (at right), where he had lived since taking the job in 1960. Prior to his death, Coney Island Light was one of only two manned lighthouses remaining in the country, the other being the 1783 Boston Light, whose original 1716 incarnation was America's first lighthouse. Mr. Schubert was for some time the nation's last civilian lighthouse keeper — Boston Light had long been staffed by Coast Guard personnel — but a few months before he died, a civilian named Sally Snowman was hired as the keeper of Boston Light, becoming the first female ever to hold that position. And now that Mr. Schubert has passed away, she's the only lighthouse keeper left in the United States.

Here on the private beach of Sea Gate, the gated community that occupies the western end of the Coney Island peninsula, the Army Corps of Engineers is at work on a $25.2 million shoreline protection project. Pictured above is the construction of one of four T-groins designed to prevent erosion of the beach, to which 125,000 cubic yards of sand will be added. The fact that federal funds are being used to build up a private beach has raised some eyebrows, but, according to the Army Corps,

the work is primarily benefitting the original Coney Island coastal storm risk reduction project that was first constructed in the 1990s. . . .

While the Sea Gate work will definitely provide some coastal storm risk benefits to the Sea Gate community, it will not be of the size and scope of the public beach originally constructed to the east of the W. 37th Street groin and the primary benefit of completing this important portion of the Coney Island project is reinforcing the integrity of the W. 37th Street groin which anchors the public beach.

The Bernard Haber Houses