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Luna Park, the new Coney Island amusement park, opens on Memorial Day weekend. It will be the first sign of some of the changes that are promised as the city moves forward with its rezoning plan. But for residents, the amusement park itself means more than 19 new rides and the start of the summer. It means jobs.

Not far from the Boardwalk on the western edge of Coney Island, six high rise public housing complexes are an imposing part of the skyline and are home to more than 5,000 Brooklynites. The unemployment rate here is 12 percent, 2 percentage points higher than the average for the rest of the city.

So it's no surprise several hundred applicants have shown up for the first job fair held at MCU Park, where the Cyclones baseball team plays, to apply for a couple hundred of the highly coveted positions at Luna Park.

Darnell Adams, 19, has never worked for an amusement park before. He's never worked anywhere, but it's not from lack of trying.

"I went to McDonald's like three times. I went to Nathan's," he says, "so I hope I get this job right here. I went to so many jobs and they just don't accept me. I'm just wondering why."

He's not the only one who's looking for their first job. Elyse Francis, 18, has also been searching for more than a year.

"People expect you to have a lot of experiences, but when you can't really find a job you don't really have no experience," she says. "The only experience I have is cleaning up. I know how to clean really good, so I'm just looking for anything, it don't really matter what it is."

One of the volunteer job screeners at the event, Deborah Carter, is a charismatic black woman who can get away with calling nearly everyone in her path "baby." She's lived in Coney Island all her 55 years. Carter says she's been seeing first timers like Adams and Francis throughout the afternoon.

But it's not a new thing for her. As the Tenant Association president for the nearly 1,500 hundred residents at the Gravesend Houses, she says she can barely take three steps without hearing the plea. "Miss Carter, I need a job. Miss Carter, I need a job. Everywhere I go, to the grocery store, on my way to work, its Miss Carter, I need a job," she says. "Well you know what? It bothers me to see young people hollering out for jobs."

People don't only ask her for jobs as she walks around her development, surrounded by its 15 different buildings. She nudges them too. She walks up to a couple of men in their twenties.

"Did you get a job?"

"Not yet."

"Did you apply?"

"No, I actually just had a baby, I'm gonna get down there..."

"Ok, ok."

Carter says she's hoping that locals will get first dibs to be the game operators, ticket sellers, food servers, and security guards at the park.

The Coney Island Development Corporation and the park operator, Central Amusement International, has been making an effort to reach out to residents. They've arranged for community leaders like Carter to pre-screen applicants one on one and help get a larger pool to move on to an interview.

As part of that effort, the final recruitment fair is being held in the community center of the Carey Garden Projects. There's a long line for much of the six-hour event.

Wanda Feliciano, president of the tenants' association for the Unity Towers Houses, is manning the line of applicants waiting to get inside.

"You can see the line. It's all ages and groups. It's older and younger and teenagers and grandpas. They need jobs," she says.

From her vantage point, New Yorkers in other parts of the city have misjudged or look down on people who live in her part of Coney Island.

"I think that people have that misunderstanding that because you live in this neighborhood that we are poor and don't want. That's not true," she says. "We do want.... We do need. I do pay taxes."

But Feliciano says Coney Islanders are resilient.

"We do what we gotta do to survive, ya know? If you have to feed your children Oodles of Noodles one day and then meat the next, you do what you gotta do, because it's very hard. People around here have a lot of children."

In this area, nearly 34 percent of teenage girls have at least one child.

Anna Torres has been unemployed for two years and is a single mother of three who has been getting by living on public assistance but really wants to work.

She says she's plenty qualified to work at this amusement park.

"Sales, customer service, receptionist, customer service, food prep."

She says she doesn't mind that the positions will only pay between $8 and $12 an hour and she'll take anything.

"Whatever's gonna give me an opportunity to take care of my kids," she says.

Of the 900 applicants who were interviewed last week for Luna Park jobs, 700 were from Coney Island. Job offers go out this week to the couple hundred selected.