Coney Island is hardly an obscure summertime destination, as the beach, the boardwalk, Nathan’s, the Cyclone, and KeySpan Park beckon. Coney, however, is much more than just its main attractions. When you visit this summer, be sure to walk along the Bowery, Jones Walk, and other streets in the amusement area to see the hand-painted signs that artists, calling themselves the Dreamland Artist Club, aided by the nonprofit Creative Time, have revived. The project was inaugurated last summer and is back this year with new artists and signs. Then head north. That’s right – away from the water.

Coney’s back streets can seem desolate or otherwise desperately unappealing, but they also can surprise, especially in the tattered remnants of the old Italian community that’s centered around the handsome Our Lady of Solace Church off Mermaid Avenue at West 17th Street. But the real epicenter of old Italian Coney is Totonno’s, Brooklyn’s oldest and – to this writer’s palate – best pizzeria, located on Neptune Avenue between West 15th and 16th Streets. It has a dingy hole-in-the-wall feeling to it, but the genuine brick oven pizzas are out of this world, and the bottled Brooklyn Lager is freshly dated.

Finally, walk over to the boardwalk – but not the part that runs past the amusement parks. Rather, head west of Steeplechase Pier, into the seeming no-man’s-land beyond the criminally ugly Abe Stark Recreation Center. The old Childs Restaurant from 1924, at West 21st Street, was designated as a New York City landmark in 2003. It is a restaurant no longer, but still stands as a mirage-like vision of glorious polychromatic glazed terra-cotta, among the best you’ll see in New York.