Ask a historian: Did the Thunderbolt’s namesake once run a brothel?
Dennis from Sea Gate asks: Did Mike Norton [a New York politician of the late 19th-century Tammany Hall era] run a swanky brothel at Norton’s Point?
Not swanky, but that doesn’t give him a clean bill of sale.
Norton’s Point, today’s Sea Gate, evolved as one of the shadiest areas in rough old Coney Island. But prostitution wasn’t its biggest sin. Cheating the rubes was.