Annual Tradition Expands Costume Guidelines Following Community Feedback That Previous Guidelines Were Too Restrictive
CONEY ISLAND, BROOKLYN — The 40th annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade proceeded along Surf Avenue last weekend with record attendance, a sound system audible from the Verrazano Bridge, and an expanded costume guidelines document that organizers describe as “a living framework for creative self-expression in an oceanic register” and that parade veterans describe as “basically just confirming that anything involving fish is fine.”
The Parade: Its Fortieth Year
The Mermaid Parade, which began in 1983 as an art-focused revival of Coney Island’s Mardi Gras tradition and which has grown into one of New York City’s most joyfully eccentric summer events, celebrated its fortieth anniversary with what organizers called “the most diverse and elaborately costumed field in parade history.” This is a meaningful claim, given that past parade fields have included a man dressed as a sentient wave, a group dressed collectively as a reef ecosystem, and, in 2019, a delegation of actual competitive swimmers in historically accurate Victorian bathing costumes who described their participation as “both ironic and deeply sincere.”
The fortieth edition drew an estimated 50,000 spectators and approximately 3,000 marchers, a ratio that reflects Coney Island’s particular gift for producing events where watching is almost as interesting as participating, which is not true of most parades and is extremely true of this one.
The Costume Guidelines: Expanded
The seven new categories of acceptable attire, added to the parade’s creative framework following a community feedback process that organizers describe as “robust” and participants describe as “very democratic, which took a while,” include: Freshwater Entities (covering river nymphs, lake monsters, and the socially conscious option of personifying a specific named body of water); Deep Sea Bureaucracy (covering anglerfish in suits, bioluminescent middle managers, and the concept of a coral reef’s HOA); Maritime Capitalism (covering pirates, shipping executives, and anyone costumed as a container ship flagged in Panama for tax purposes); and Post-Oceanic Futures (covering what the ocean might look like in 200 years, which organizers note can be interpreted optimistically or pessimistically and “both approaches have been represented in previous years with roughly equal artistic merit”).
The three remaining new categories are Speculative Cetacean, Benthic Feminism, and simply “Barnacle,” which the guidelines describe as “open to interpretation” and which parade veterans expect to produce the most interesting results.
The Fortieth Anniversary Queen and King
Each year, the Mermaid Parade crowns a Mermaid Queen and a King Neptune. This year’s honorees were selected for their cumulative contribution to Coney Island’s cultural ecosystem and their commitment to what the parade’s founder, Dick Zigun, calls “the sacred ridiculousness of the thing.” The Queen, a Brooklyn-based textile artist, arrived in a gown constructed from 2,400 individually knotted fishing net fragments and a headdress featuring seventeen actual starfish obtained from a sustainable seafood supplier who confirmed in writing that the starfish died of natural causes, a documentation requirement that the parade introduced in 2023 following an incident involving a lobster that this article will not relitigate.
Coney Island in Context
Coney Island’s summer season is in full swing, with the boardwalk operating at capacity and Nathan’s Famous reporting hot dog sales consistent with its status as one of New York City’s most reliable tourist destinations. The combination of the Mermaid Parade, the World Cup watch parties along the beachfront, and the standard summer complement of roller coasters, amusement parks, and people making choices about food that they will not regret until later has produced what local business owners are calling “an excellent June,” which in Coney Island is measured primarily in footfall and funnel cake units.
The parade’s fortieth year also marks its transition to a new organizational structure in which a community board co-governs major creative decisions with the founding organization, a change that Zigun called “the natural evolution of a community institution” and that ensures the parade’s continued weirdness is democratically produced rather than top-down mandated, which seems correct for an event whose entire purpose is to dress as a fish and walk down Surf Avenue in front of thousands of people who are glad you did.
The Parade’s Cultural Significance
The Mermaid Parade is one of the few large-scale New York City events that is genuinely, structurally weird, rather than corporate-sponsored weird or curated-weird, which are different categories. Its weirdness is produced by the participants, who are mostly not professional performers, who make their own costumes, who march for reasons that are personal rather than commercial, and whose relationship to the ocean is a mixture of literal affection for the water, metaphorical connection to themes of transformation and fluidity, and in some cases simply the knowledge that dressing as a fish and walking down Surf Avenue is exactly the kind of thing that New York permits and encourages, and that this permission is one of the city’s genuinely important gifts to the people who live in it.
The Solar Technology: Worth Explaining
Big Belly solar compacting units have been deployed in cities including Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. since the mid-2000s, with consistently positive outcomes for collection efficiency and street cleanliness. The units in New York’s deployment are equipped with a wireless communication module that reports fill levels to Sanitation’s route management system every four hours, allowing supervisors to redirect collection trucks based on actual need rather than fixed schedules. The result, in cities where the technology has been operational for more than three years, is a 40 to 70 percent reduction in collection frequency per unit, which translates directly into fewer truck runs, less fuel consumption, and lower per-unit operating costs that more than offset the higher upfront equipment cost within two to four years of deployment. The Yelp review ecosystem that has developed around the new units was not anticipated in the procurement analysis, but Sanitation is reading the reviews and the stiff-lid issue has been escalated to the manufacturer.
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