It may not happen to everybody, but when I moved to New York City from Texas I was gripped by that obsession particular to transplants: the search for "real" New York. My friends and I spent evenings and weekends trekking to places based on their exotic backstory and supposed "authenticity": the Brighton Beach nightclub stuffed like a pierogi with Russian mobsters, the late-night bar tricked out with transvestite prostitutes, the Upper East Side restaurants decorated by society dames with their youthful escorts and pulled faces.

This is why Coney Island appeals: it unashamedly lives down to your expectations. Let Manhattan keep its sexy bars and stilettos. Coney Island is gum-under-your-seat grimy, where bizarre characters loiter on the boardwalk, cheap games relieve you of your money, and the amusements are all old-fashioned: kiddie boat rides, bumper cars, and batting cages.

There's a shooting gallery (with toy guns, not needles), a spook house, and chintzy fairground tests of strength involving a very light softball and very heavy milk bottles. But mainly you just walk around. Maybe eat an ice cream. Walk down to the ocean. You do the things that people have been doing there for decades. It feels old-fashioned but not in a Kevin Costner movie way. Coney Island evokes a simpler era without drenching it in sepia.

Just as the diversions are simple, their appeal is sharp, striking a nerve in even the flintiest hearts. Coney Island became one of my favourite "ironic" date spots (now I weep at my cavalier attitude toward its charms), and I visited with all my boyfriends. I saw one of them - a romantic yet cruel man - balking like a frightened child at riding in the Wonder Wheel.

This ferris wheel has several cars that rock and shimmy back and forth on little tracks as the wheel goes round. As I started playfully rocking our cage he yelped and squealed and begged me to stop. (It's hard to see a good man cry, but with the other sort it's surprisingly easy.)

The jewel in the crown of Coney Island is of course the Cyclone, a wooden roller coaster that isn't the biggest, the fastest or the highest in the world, yet undoubtedly feels the most death-defying. First opened in 1927, the coaster was rehabilitated and reopened in 1975 and has been a listed landmark since 1988. Its frame twists and turns and drops in a tiny space, in the tradition of New York apartments. I noticed on my first visit as the cars came round the final turn they nudged the chain link fence.

People tell you it's scary, but you see this little quaint wooden thing - practically an antique - and scoff. You climb in and you realise you're actually at the mercy of this quaint wooden toy. At the top of the first drop (85 feet down at a 60-degree angle) you feel yourself lifting out of the seat, a sensation as if you're about to pitch forward onto the track below.

At the bottom you're slammed back down, then pinned in the corner of the seat as the car screeches round a turn (don't ride with someone too heavy as they'll squish you on the turns). I screamed the entire time.

I visited again recently with my husband. We took the F train 45 minutes to the Coney Island stop and walked to the boardwalk in the rain, just like on my very first visit more than 10 years ago. We shared a soda and a hotdog, bought a Brooklyn sweatshirt from a shop crammed with tourist tat, walked along to the New York Aquarium and made our way back. We considered riding the roller coaster and the Zipper, but it was so chilly we went home. It's probably the last time I'll see it.

Old Coney Island will be dismantled once Thor Equities - which bought 10 acres of land - breaks ground on its planned $1.5 billion entertainment complex. It could be the end of the old-fashioned signs made up of hundreds of little light bulbs, of another display topped by a rocketship created when space travel was the new gee-whiz thing in town.

Now there is no gourmet food: just hot dogs, knishes, kebabs. Can Coney Island be Coney Island if they're serving rocket and parmesan salads? Will the annual Mermaid Parade - where residents and resident wackos dress up as sea creatures and walk the boardwalk - still come up for air?

New York is always changing - that's inescapable. Times Square is now sanitised for your protection. Two great symbols of the city collapsed before our eyes on September 11. Must we hasten the end of another great momument to New York's staying power, its gumption, its realness? Coney Island - get it while it lasts

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