‘Canarsie’ is adapted from a Lenape word for ‘fenced land’ or ‘fort’.
Europeans also applied the name to the local people, the ‘Canarsie’ or ‘Canarsee’ Indians, and wrote it in many ways, from ‘Canarisse’ to ‘Kanarsingh’. Rockaway Parkway began as an 18th-century road to the Canarsie Ferry. Despite its name, it does not reach the Rockaways, whose name comes from a Lenape place name that may have meant ‘place of sands’.