Coney Island - Tourist Attractions in New York City
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Coney Island is a peninsula, formerly an island, in southernmost Brooklyn, New York City, USA, with a beach on the Atlantic Ocean. The eponymous neighborhood is a community of 60,000 people in the western part of the peninsula, with Seagate to its west; Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach to its east; and Gravesend to the north.
The area was a major resort and site of amusement parks that reached its peak in the early 20th century. It declined in popularity after World War II and endured years of neglect. In recent years, the area has been revitalized by the opening of KeySpan Park, home to the successful Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball team.
Geography
Coney Island is the westernmost of the barrier islands of Long Island, about four miles long and one-half mile wide. It used to be an island, separated from the main part of Brooklyn by Coney Island Creek, part of which was little more than tidal flats. There were plans into the 20th century to dredge and straighten the creek as a ship canal, but they were abandoned and the center of the creek was filled in for construction of the Belt Parkway before World War II. The western and eastern ends are now peninsulas.
History
Native American inhabitants, the Lenape, called the island Narrioch,[citation needed] "land without shadows", because - as is true of other south shore Long Island beaches - its compass orientation keeps the beach area in sunlight all day.
The Dutch name for the island was Conyne Eylandt, or Konijn Eiland (Rabbit Island) using modern Dutch spelling. This name is found on the New Netherland map of 1639 by Johannes Vingboon. (New York State and New York City were originally a Dutch colony and settlement, named Nieuw Nederlandt and Nieuw Amsterdam.) As with other Long Island barrier islands, Coney Island was virtually overrun with rabbits, and rabbit hunting was common until the resorts were developed and most open space eliminated. It is generally accepted by scholars that Coney Island is the English adaptation of the Dutch name, Konijn Eiland. Coney is also an obsolete and dialectical English word for rabbit. Coney came into the English language through Old French (Conil), which derives from the Latin word for rabbit, cuniculus The English name "Conney Isle" was used on maps as early as 1690 and by 1733 the modern spelling "Coney Island" was used. The John Eddy map of 1811 also uses the modern "Coney Island" spelling.
Even though the history of Coney Island's name and its Anglicization can be traced through historical maps spanning the 17th century to the present, and all the names translate to "Rabbit Island" in modern English, there are still those who contend that the name derives from other sources. Some say that early English settlers named it Coney Island after its cone-like hills. Others claim that an Irish captain named Peter O'Connor had, in the 1700s, named Coney Island after an island (Inishmulclohy) in County Sligo, Ireland. Yet another purported origin is from the name of the Indian tribe (the Konoh tribe) who supposedly once inhabited it. A further claim is that the island is named after Henry Hudson's "right-hand-man" John Coleman, supposed to have been slain by Indians.
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Directions
Coney Island is located in the southernmost part of Brooklyn. If you are mapquesting, you can use the address 1000 Surf Avenue.
By Train:
Take the D, Q N or F train to Stillwell Avenue (last stop). This takes about 45 minutes from midtown Manhattan
By Car:
Take the Belt Parkway to exit 6. Head south on Cropsey Avenue to West 17th Street. Keyspan Park and the Parachute Jump will be in front of you on Surf Avenue. Parking is available along most streets. There are commercial parking lots on West 17th Street and West 12th Street between Mermaid and Surf, West 15th Street between the Boardwalk and Surf and on Neptune Avenue between West 12th and Stillwell Avenue.
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