Coney Island Lighthouse

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.