one o'clock
There is an intensity about September noonday on Coney Island , aided and abetted by tin roofs , metallic façades , gilt domes , looking-glass fronts , jeweled spires , screaming peanut and frankfurter-stands , which has not its peculiar kind of equal this side of opalescent Tangiers . Here the sea air can become a sort of hot camphor-ice to the cheek , the sea itself a percolator , boiling up against a glass surface . Beneath the tin roofs of Ocean Avenue the indoor heat takes on the kind of intense density that is cotton in the mouth and ringing in the ears . At one o'clock the jibberwock exteriors of Ocean Avenue begin fantastic signs of life . The House of Folly breaks out , over its entire façade , into a chicken-pox of red and green , blue and purple , yellow , violet , and gold electric bulbs . The Ocean Waves concession begins its side-splitting undulations . Maha Mahadra , India 's foremost soothsayer -LRB- down in police , divorce , and night courts as Mamie Jones , May Costello , and Mabel Brown , respectively -RRB- , loops back her spangled portière .