Canarsie - A Brooklyn Neighborhood

In the mid-19th Century, thanks to the Rockaway Beach Railroad, Canarsie became a beach resort with hotels, beer gardens, and vaudeville houses overlooking Jamaica Bay. In 1907, the Golden City Amusement Park opened at Seaview Avenue and Canarsie Road featuring rides, games, dance halls, and vaudeville. Decades later the amusement park burned and the entire site was razed in 1939 to prepare for the construction of the Belt Parkway. The Canarsie Pier, a publicly funded waterfront project, also was built about the same time on the site of the amusement park and adjoins the 132-acre Canarsie Beach Park.

In the 1950s, marshland was filled to create Seaview Village, which consisted of ranch-style, split-level houses, and attached row houses in a 40-block area in the northeastern section of the neighborhood, and two public housing developments were built in the community. In the 1960s, an area called Paerdegat on the Paerdegat Basin was developed with brick two-, three-, and four-family houses.

Early residents included African-Americans, German-Americans, Dutch, Scottish, and Irish immigrants. In the 1920s, Italian American and Jewish families moved into the area, and in the last decade, West Indian families, primarily from Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Grenada, have bought homes in the community, and have been joined by families from China, the former Soviet Union, Israel, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.