The Metropolitan Museum has its grand staircase, the Guggenheim its spiral. The Coney Island Museum has attitude.

Climb the long, narrow staircase from the street, and you’ll immediately realize it has a mission, too: “Hurry-hurry-hurry, Friends and Neighbors!” says the sign near the front desk. “Step right up, pay the gentle ticket-seller, and enter a unique institution dedicated to a unique place … Enter a world of nostalgia and emerge with the vision to fuel a ‘Coney Island Comeback.'”

The museum’s single, large gallery, with well-worn floorboards and a peeling ceiling, boasts all sorts of fascinating paraphernalia – bumper cars, rolling wicker carts for the boardwalk, fun-house mirrors, hand-painted signs – from the resort’s heyday nearly a century ago. Visitors will be shocked, shocked to find some objects of questionable taste, such as a photograph of Sealo, the armless Seal Boy, or a gadget called a Mutoscope, a kind of crank-operated flipbook which for a penny plays Thomas Edison’s film of the electrocution of the hapless circus elephant Topsy. Equally amazing is the museum’s entrance fee: “99 cents – cheap.”

The parent organization for this unusual museum is Coney Island USA, a nonprofit institution founded in 1980 to “defend the honor of American popular art forms through innovative exhibitions and performances.” Artistic Director Dick Zigun’s goal of rejuvenating Coney Island culture is an ambitious one. Around 1900, when the resort could attract a million visitors a day, its fantastic, illuminated minarets and towers made its skyline more impressive than Manhattan’s. But the last of the original Coney Island amusement parks was demolished in 1965, and the neighborhood became a symbol of urban decay.

The museum’s exhibition “Subway to Dreamland” documents three recent construction projects intended to revitalize Coney Island’s architectural heritage. Consisting of a slide show and several large illustrated placards, the exhibition’s tone is as much promotional as analytical (this is Coney Island, after all), but it definitely inspires a firsthand investigation.

This is easy enough – all three projects are within a few minutes’ walking distance. Across Surf Avenue from the museum is the new Stillwell Avenue Portal Building designed by di Domenico & Partners. Its three-story facade incorporates the terra-cotta parapet from the site’s previous building, adding above it a huge arched window, stylishly framed with exposed steel beams. An articulated tower rises from one corner, sporting countless small lights in the spirit of the original amusement park’s minarets. The attractive interior features a retail arcade, along with a future space for the NYPD’s 34th Precinct, its entrance already nattily decked out with twin, art deco lamps. An exuberant triptych banner by Marie Roberts, announcing the museum exhibition, adorns a wall across the arcade.

The Portal Building incorporates the second project, Robert Wilson’s 370-foot-long curving wall of silk-screened glass bricks. The images embedded in this translucent wall are derived from archival images of Coney Island entertainments, rendered in heightened colors with discreet Benday dots and illuminated from behind by ambient light. A pop art-like rendering of a giant hot dog dominates one end. The effect is a pleasing, kinetic blend of over-the-top consumerism and wistful nostalgia.

Walk east on Surf Avenue, and you can’t miss the third project: the new south facade of the elevated West 8th Street subway station, designed by Acconci Studio in collaboration with architect Daniel Frankfurt. Stretching more than 600 feet across two avenues, the immense facade is perforated by a series of asymmetrical curving openings that suggest the rolling motion of waves, trains, and roller coasters. These permit views of the ocean, for the first time, from the train platforms. In places the swellings fold inward to create sweeping benches. A slight unevenness in the curves and the busy profusion of angled struts give it a rough outlandishness quite unlike, say, Eero Saarinen’s sleek TWA terminal at JFK. It’s as much fun house as Bauhaus.

All three projects represent a felicitous merging of aesthetic and economic realities. The Acconci facade and Wilson’s wall were both funded by the MTA’s Arts for Transit program; the upper floors of the Portal Building will house MTA and NYPD offices. As it happens, all three capture more of the neighborhood’s unique flavor than two other recent (and otherwise impressive) Coney Island developments: KeySpan Park, home of the minor-league Cyclones, and the enormous, glass-canopied Stillwell Avenue subway terminal directly behind the Portal Building.

For a dose of intense local culture, check out the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, another Coney Island USA project just around the corner from the museum. With a little luck, you’ll snag a front-row seat and be “volunteered” to extract a 2-foot sword from the throat of a comely sword-swallower. (I was considerably more flustered about the whole process than the performer.) Only in Coney Island.

Until September 18 (1208 Surf Avenue, Brooklyn, between West 12th Street and Stillwell Avenue, 718-372-5159).