Sea Gate, Brooklyn: A Private Enclave Behind the Gate

Sea Gate is a private gated community of roughly 850 single-family homes. The Sea Gate Association governs it and controls access for non-residents. The main vehicle entrance is a gate on Surf Avenue, flanked by a police station and the association's office. Residents pay for their own sewer, beach, lifeguard, street-light and street-cleaning services, and for private security through the Sea Gate Public Safety Department; the NYPD's 60th Precinct patrols the area. The community was 99 percent white in 1960 and 83 percent white by the 2010 census.

The two sites described below both stand inside those gates. The Coney Island Light sits on Coast Guard property at the western tip of the peninsula, and the chapel is the first structure a visitor sees on entering the main security gate.

As of 2005 coverage, the population was largely Russian, Hasidic and elderly, with five shtibelach and a Chabad yeshiva, Tiferes Menachem. Hurricane Sandy flooded homes here in 2012, battered the shoreline and destroyed the sea wall at the neighborhood's Lindy Park.

There is no subway station in Sea Gate. The nearest is Coney Island–Stillwell Avenue, in Coney Island, served by the D, F, N and Q.

Buses are the recorded way in. The B74 is a loop route: it begins at the Mermaid Avenue bus loop by Coney Island–Stillwell Avenue station, runs west along Mermaid Avenue to West 37th Street and into Sea Gate, terminates at West 37th Street and Neptune Avenue inside the gated community, then loops back by way of Bayview Avenue and West 33rd Street. It is the successor to the Norton's Point streetcar line, whose streetcars were replaced by motorbuses on November 7, 1948.

The X28 express bus runs between Lower Manhattan, at Thomas and Church Streets, and Bensonhurst, with a Sea Gate terminus at West 37th Street and Surf Avenue served part-time in the peak direction and on late nights only.