Coney Island Light Station, New York

Coney Island, now a peninsula attached to the mainland, was formerly the weseternmost of the barrier islands off New York's Long Island. The island was named for its once teeming rabbit population; coney is an old word for rabbit. A bill "to establish lights at the western end of Coney Island," known as Norton's Point (after a nineteenth-century politician who once ran a hotel at the point), was introduced in Congress in 1888. J.O. Coleman, New York City's commissioner of street cleaning, urged passage of the bill in a February 1889 letter to New York's representatives in Congress. Many vessels, wrote Coleman, including passenger steamers and the tugboats of his own department, had to navigate the narrow channel around Coney Island day and night.