Mermaid Mania

For that impudence, Hurricane Sandy shoved five feet of seawater onto the century-old-resort's streets and into its buildings, scuttling small businesses and ousting ground-floor apartment dwellers. About a quarter of those businesses are still rebuilding seven-plus months later, news.nationalgeographic.com reports.

Sandy almost stopped the neighborhood's biggest one-day tourist draw-the Mermaid Parade -from happening this June, too.

But it didn't, thanks to an unlikely source: the Internet. A kickstarter campaign funded this year's parade, paying for necessary infrastructure and police presence. The parade's founder, Dick Zigun, came up with the idea when the organization he founded to support arcane Americana, Coney Island U.S.A., couldn't foot the bill.

"We're at a point where our non-for-profit arts group, which earns 60 percent of its budget, has been closed for seven months," he says. "I can't commit organizational suicide for the sake of one more Mermaid Parade."

The biggest expense is the attendees. "We have to insure them and manage them," says Zigun. "The Mermaid Parade is bigger than Woodstock, and you can't run Woodstock with a hundred volunteers with their heart in the right place."

The Kickstarter campaign raised $117,000-enough that the parade will take place on June 22 at 1 p.m. Zigun is expecting thousands of mermaids and mermen, plus all manner of sea creatures, real and imagined.

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