Coney Island Creek

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Coney Island Creek is a sea inlet separating the western portion of Coney Island from the main body of Kings County, New York.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, but prior to the 1940s, Coney Island Creek was a strait connecting Gravesend Bay and Sheepshead Bay, both connected to the Atlantic Ocean, making Coney Island an actual island off the mainland of Kings County. All of Coney Island and the portion of land nearest the creek on the other side 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 (circa 1940s) 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 that still exists on the Gravesend Bay side 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.