CONNECTIONS: TEN EYCK STREET AND COENTIES SLIP

HERE’S the front doorway of #5-#7 Ten Eyck Street at Union Avenue. Ten Eyck Street runs in three pieces in East Williamsburg, through the Williamsburg Houses, where it’s reduced to Ten Eyck Walk, further interrupted by English Kills and petering to a stop in an industrial area at Stewart Avenue south of Metropolitan. “Ten Eyck” in an archaic old Dutch spelling means “the oaks,” but it’s not named for oak trees in the area. Instead, it recalls Coenraedt Ten Eyck.

Coenti(e)s Slip was one of the largest of lower Manhattan’s boat slips. It has pretty much kept its old slanted shape, too. The slip was filled in around 1870. In the background looms 85 Broad Street, the present NYC home of Goldman Sachs, built in 1983. It demolished part of Stone Street, which prompted the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission to protect the original Dutch street layout in lower Manhattan. 85 Broad stands where the seat of Dutch colonial government, the Stadt Huys, or State House, used to be. Archeological remnants of the neighboring Lovelace Tavern are still there.

The name “Coenties” is old Dutch as Dutch can be since it recalls an early landowner from New Netherlands era, Coenraet Ten Eyck, a tanner and shoemaker. He was nicknamed Coentje, or “Coonchy” to the British, and over time settled into this spelling. Ten Eyck Street in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg was also named for him. Another story has it that the name is a contraction of “Conraet’s and Antje’s”–Coenraet Ten Eyck and his wife Antje.

Ten Eyck’s descendants spread out, with some winding up in Kings County. William Ten Eyck was a prominent churchman, a deacon at the Second Dutch Reformed Church in Bushwick, according to Benardo and Weiss in Brooklyn By Name.

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5/22/24