[Photo courtesy of Forgotten NY]

For anything and everything that there is to know about Canarsie, go to the latest installment of Forgotten New York, where Kevin Walsh has outdone himself with two pages of words and photos about the Southern Brooklyn community. Here’s some history:

Canarsie, which is located between Paerdegat Basin on the west (Paerdegat is a British corruption of Dutch words meaning “horse gate”) Jamaica Bay on the southeast, Fresh Creek Basin on the east and (this is my determination) Foster Avenue on the north, has been settled for thousands of years. It was first occupied by the Indian tribe that gave the neighborhood its moniker, the Canarsees. The name “Canarsee”‘s etymology is in dispute, but it some scholars of Native American tongues say it means “fenced land” or “fenced place.”…The first European to make a permanent home in the Canarsie area was Dutchman Peter Claesen Wyckoff, who arrived in 1652 after several years of indentured servitude in Albany. The home that he built that year at Canarsie’s outskirts, at today’s Clarendon Road and Ralph Avenue still stands…

Head over and check it out. It’s very, very good stuff.