Coney Island’s Mermaid Parade in photos

"We crawled in from the sea and got as far as Mermaid Avenue.”

June 24, 2019 Paul Frangipane

Welcome to Coney Island's Mermaid Parade — an annual solstice celebration of eccentricity, art and summer. Eagle photo by Paul Frangipane

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Hundreds of thousands of people descended on Coney Island Saturday afternoon for the annual event that draws creatures of the sea (read: the five boroughs and beyond) and out onto land (read: Surf Avenue) in a celebration of eccentrics, art and summer.

The 37th annual Mermaid Parade took over the neighborhood’s amusement district, featuring revelers decked out in seafaring attire and reportedly drawing more than 800,000 people to Coney. It is considered the largest artistic parade in the country.

“The sun is here. It rained all week, didn’t it? But the sun is here. The solstice is here,” said Dick Zigun, the parade’s founder.

Zigun, the perpetual, unofficial mayor of Coney Island, founded the event in 1983 as a way to pay homage to the neighborhood’s artist community. This year, he welcomed two Coney Island natives back to the shore as the parade’s King Neptune and Queen Mermaid: siblings Arlo and Nora Guthrie.

The two are children of the iconic folk singer Woody Guthrie, and they are the first king of queen to have actually lived on Mermaid Avenue.

“This is the air that birthed us, this is the sand that birthed us,” Nora Guthrie said at an early-morning street co-naming for her father. “We’re kind of like amphibious. We crawled in from the sea and got as far as Mermaid Avenue.”

The parade not only puts barely-dressed mermaids in the spotlight, it encourages spectators to dress up and join in on the fun, turning the neighborhood into a commingling of land and sea creatures that keeps up for hours after the parade reaches its end.