Coney Island Creek
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Coney Island Creek was a strait connecting Gravesend Bay and Sheepshead Bay, both connected to the Atlantic Ocean, and separating the main portion of Kings County, New York from Coney Island. Both land masses were originally part of the Town of Gravesend, and are now part of the Borough of Brooklyn, New York City.
Coney Island Creek was minimally navigable and there were plans to widen, straighten and deepen it as the Gravesend Ship Canal. The canal was never built and, at the time of the building of the Belt Parkway (circa1940s) over part of its bed, the creek was filled in from Shell Road (extension of McDonald, formerly Gravesend, Avenue) on the west to West End Avenue on the east, so that Coney Island is no longer an island. Coney Island would more properly be described now as a peninsula.
Today, the Western portion of Coney Island Creek still exists on the Gravesend Bay side, and is spanned by highway bridges at Cropsey Avenue and Stillwell Avenue, and by a subway system bridge east of Stillwell Avenue. The eastern portion of the creek has either been filled in or absorbed in the widened and bulkheaded Sheepshead Bay.