Canarsie
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Canarsie is a neighborhood in the eastern portion of the borough of Brooklyn, in New York City. Its name is Algonquin for "fenced land" or "fort." The famous sale of Manhattan for 24 guilders was actually a scam on the part of the Indians. The Indians who did the selling were from what is now Canarsie; they did not possess Manhattan at all.
Canarsie was built on swamps by Jamaica Bay. It was a fishing village through the 1800s, until pollution killed the oysters and the edible fish. In the 1920s Italians settled in the area, later joined by Jews. During the 1950s, Canarsie was a kind of byword for mediocrity for elite Manhattanites. Some said all Canarsie had were three "M's" - "mud, mortgages, and malaria."
Canarsie lies within the former town of Flatlands, one of the five original Dutch towns on Long Island.
Bordered on the east by Fresh Creek and East 108th Street, on the north by the Long Island Rail Road's Bay Ridge Line, on the west by Ralph Avenue and the Paerdegat Basin and on the south by Jamaica Bay, Canarsie is home to approximately 96,000 people.
The majority of the structures in Canarsie are one and two family homes, although there are two large public housing developments and a number of small apartment buildings scattered throughout the community.
The principal commercial streets are Rockaway Parkway and Avenue L.
In the 1970s neighborhoods around Canarsie had begun to "turn" from white to black, a process documented by Jonathan Rieder in his classic sociological work: Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism.
The BMT Canarsie Line of the New York City Subway serves Canarsie.