THERE are no less than 20 place names in Brooklyn named “Paerdegat.” There’s Paerdegat Park, shown here; Paerdegat Basin, which separates the communities of Bergen Beach/Georgetown and Canarsie; Paerdegat Avenue North and Paerdegat Avenue South, in the general area of the basin; and Paerdegat 1st through 15th Streets in Canarsie. There’s also the Paerdegat Yacht Club located in Canarsie at the basin. I’m not up on Dutch, so I presume the name is pronounced PAIR-dee-gat, but if I’m wrong, Comments are open. Unlike, say, Amersfort and New Utrecht, there’s no corresponding town in Holland named “Paerdegat.”
Paerdegat Park, which makes up the entire block between Foster Avenue and Farragut Road between East 40th Street and Albany Avenue, has one of Brooklyn’s Dutchiest of Dutch names, a transliteration of paard gat, “horse gate.” Its original use in Kings County was for Paerdegat Creek, which once ran from about where East 31st Street and Foster Avenue would be laid out southeast into Jamaica Bay. In the 1920s its northern section was filled in and the southern end dredged to make it available for shipping as the Paerdegat Basin, which today runs only as north as Flatland and Ralph Avenues, where we today find the Bureau of Sewers, seen on this FNY page. The land was acquired by NYC for public park use in 1941. You have to use your imagination why there is a body of water named for a “horse gate.” I’m guessing that the farms in the towns of Flatbush and Flatlands had corrals to keep their horses fenced in, and all this was within spitting distance of the creek.
This map from 1890 shows how far Paerdegat Creek once penetrated into East Flatbush. The streets shown in dotted lines in buff were still in the planning stages, with the already existing routes in purple.
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