Sea Gate is a private gated community situated just west of the hustle and bustle of the Coney Island Boardwalk. The area, surrounded by continuous shoreline, was known for gambling before it became a residential neighborhood in 1899.

A streetcar on the Norton Point Line enters the grade crossing at West 37th Street in Coney Island, April 11, 1919. Norton's Point Line streetcars were operated by the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (later the BMT) and provided service to Sea Gate, the private development at Coney Island's western end (visible in the background), via a private right of way cut between Surf and Mermaid Avenues. Streetcar service was discontinued in 1948. Prior to the 1892 establishment of the Sea Gate community, the area was known as Norton's Point, after the proprietor of a casino near the site of the Coney Island Lighthouse.

Public School No. 211, ca. 1930s. While most school buildings constructed by the city during the early part of the 20th century were multistory brick structures (with an occasional wood-frame annex building), Public School 211 in Coney Island was different. Built in the 1923, the surrounding neighborhood was still at that point sparse and residential with small, single-story structures. The school building consisted of two one-story wood-frame structures that houses more than 600 students, according to a newspaper report in 1935. The same report discussed the investigation of this school, as well as a number of others, for fire safety issues and unsanitary conditions. In 1938 the New York Times listed the construction of a new P.S. 211 (to be built at 179th Street in the Bronx) as a Public Works Administration project. The Coney Island school was likely demolished at that time or just after. The Gravesend Houses, the NYCHA buildings that currently occupy that area were built in 1954.

The Forward's love of Sea Gate, Brooklyn's historic gated beach community at the literal edge of the Atlantic adjacent to the more public Coney Island, started back when Sea Gate was on offer as a "winter retreat" for Forward reading city dwellers, back in the 1920's.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the Norton Point trolley line carried passengers from a terminal at Stillwell Avenue west into the community of Sea Gate. The right-of-way (or path) of the trolley was on Railroad Avenue, which sat between Surf and Mermaid Avenues. The trolley service was discontinued only a few months after this photo was captured. Following the December 1948 closure, the former right-of-way was briefly turned into a regular street, but that too disappeared after a few years. Today any vestiges of the trolley line have been lost under new developments of the last few decades.