Coney-catching Robert Greene in a series of 1592 pamphlets, the titles of which included "The Defence of Conny-catching," in which he argued there were worse crimes to be found among "reputable" people, and "A Disputation betweene a Hee Conny-catcher and a Shee Conny-catcher." Kirby Farrell wrote a book called "Cony-catching" in 1971. Virginia Woolf mentions "cony catchers" in her book "Orlando". Coney-catching Coney-catching is Elizabethan slang for theft through trickery. It comes from the word "coney" (sometimes spelled "conny"), meaning a rabbit raised for the table and thus tame. A coney-catcher was a thief or con man. It was a practice
Coney Island Creek Island Creek"). Eventually Hubbard’s and the other creeks and inlets that separated the islands were filled by a combination of natural process and land development, leaving just a single island that came to be called Coney Island and a single creek behind it that came to be called Coney Island Creek. Coney Island Creek was still a minimally navigable waterway over its 3-mile length through the turn of the 20th century. In a period from the late 19th century through the early 20th century there were plans to turn the creek into the "Gravesend Ship Canal". The plan including re-dredging