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Today Coney Island will again burst forth with New Yorkers in outrageous mermaid and King Neptune costumes, a display of muscle cars, topless women in pasties and colorfully clad drag queens making their way down the boardwalk among a swarm of arts-and-crafts floats.
The beautiful zaniness is all part of the annual Mermaid Parade, which for 30 years has celebrated the first weekend of summer.
This year, however, the parade faced extinction after its sponsor, Coney Island USA, had its headquarters damaged by Hurricane Sandy. Combined with rising insurance premiums, the costs of crowd control and Porta-Potties for several hundred thousand people, the parade needed an infusion of an additional $100,000, or it wouldn’t live to see a 31st edition.
It would have been a crushing end to what has become a dearly loved and widely attended New York tradition. Last year, 750,000 partiers showed up, according to figures provided to Coney Island USA by the Parks Department and the NYPD.
Dick Zigun — the unofficial mayor of Coney Island and the founder of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow — founded the parade in 1983. Originally, he wanted to create a Fourth of July event as a showcase for Coney Island artists. That was a no-go.
“I went to the community board and the police department, and they said, ‘Any day except July Fourth,’ ” Zigun remembers.
As an alternative, he created a parade based on an old tradition known as the “Mardi Gras” parades — an annual week of parades held in the fall to mark the end of summer.
“Coney Island had a rich history of parades from 1903 till the 1950s,” says Zigun. “One night there would be the Firemen’s Parade, the next day would be the Policemen’s Parade and so on.”
As Zigun wandered Coney Island avenues — called “Mermaid,” “Neptune” and “Surf” — something clicked, and the Mermaid Parade got its name.
“Before it even started, people were laughing, ‘How do mermaids march? They don’t have legs!’ ” he recalls.
In the first few years, the Mermaid Parade was mostly a local affair — some say more people marched than watched.
Coney Island residents Al Mottola, head of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, and Alison Gordy, an actress and musician, were crowned King Neptune and Queen Mermaid, respectively, the first year. All the original charm is still part of the parade: Judges sit on the grandstand to size up contestants for the costume contest, and the parade is capped off with a march onto the beach where the ocean is officially “unlocked” with a big golden key.
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Soon more boldface names started marching — radio and TV personality Joe Franklin was King Neptune in 1984. Within a few years, names as varied as Queen Latifah (1999) and Lou Reed (2010) would be crowned Queen Mermaid and King Neptune.
This year’s Queen Mermaid is Carole Radziwill, one of the Real Housewives of New York and author of the forthcoming novel “The Widow’s Guide to Sex and Dating.” Director Darren Aronofsky and actress Rachel Weisz took her for the first time six years ago.
“You know, I married a prince. Now I’ve been promoted to queen!” says Radziwill of her late husband Anthony Radziwill, who was the son of Prince Stanislas Radziwill of Poland.
Parade regular Kate Dale, a prop-shop supervisor at Juilliard, has arrived in floats that looked like a big baroque pearl or a 7-foot-tall cardboard quarter; she’s won “Best Mermaid” three times and “Best Float” four times. The parade is “where kitsch and glamour collide,” she says.
The parade also became something of a Brooklyn sex icon.
When Adam Richman, formerly the host of the Travel Channel’s “Man v. Food” show and host of the upcoming “Fandemonium,” was King Neptune in 2011, an onlooker “held up a sign that said, ‘Adam — I have an eating challenge for you . . .’ and on the other side it said, ‘In my pants!’ ”
“Seeing that while standing next to my mom was pretty hysterical,” says Richman.
One of the big changes in the mores of the parade came “the year toplessness became legal [in 1992],” says Mark Alhadeff, chief-justice-for-life of the costume competition.
“Some of the community groups stopped coming — but since then, they started coming back. We separate the people who march — the adult marchers are in one cohort, the more family-friendly in another,” says Alhadeff. “But really it’s pretty PG. Most women have pasties on.”
The fact that it also became something of an icon for drag queens has “a lot to do with the fact we were the same weekend as Wigstock,” the annual East Village drag queen festival, says Alhadeff.
It’s something of an international sensation as well. Beside the Russians who drift over from Brighton Beach, spectators from Germany and Japan have arranged their vacations around the parade.
Parades have been held in torrential downpours, but fallout from Hurricane Sandy nearly derailed this year’s parade until fans came to the rescue. The organizers at Coney Island USA helped spread the word that it needed financial help via its Twitter following.
Musician Amanda Palmer hosted a benefit for the parade last month at the Bowery Ballroom that raised $10,000 for a Kickstarter campaign. Palmer was carried out onstage by the cast of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow and performed ditties like “In My Mind” on the ukulele wearing a shell bra and a glittery green mermaid dress.
Lee Wong, an editor at Alt Variety who helped with the campaign, asked Judah Friedlander of “30 Rock” to make a PSA video to run online. The comedian recorded a deadpan, largely improvised plea in which he decries the possible extinction of the mermaid.
“I was just trying to educate people,” Friedlander tells The Post. “There are a lot of issues going on with mermaids — and this is the one day a year to celebrate them in public!”
The Kickstarter campaign raised more than $117,000, and this afternoon Friedlander, as King Neptune, and Radziwill will take their place with the other throngs of Brooklynites.
“I have no idea what’s expected of me,” says Friedlander, who has never attended a Mermaid Parade before. “But I’m no tyrant. I’m not going to be abusive of power!”
The Mermaid Parade starts at 1 p.m. today at West 21st Street and Surf Avenue, and ends at Steeplechase Plaza. Floats and marchers should register at Surf and West 21st Street; floats and antique cars should register at the Surf Avenue side at West 19th and 20th streets.
— Additional reporting by Hardeep Phull