Coney-catching 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 in medieval and Renaissance England in which devious people on the street would try to con or cheat vulnerable or gullible pedestrians. The term appears in "The Taming of the Shrew" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" by William Shakespeare, and in the John Florio translation of Montaigne's essay, "Of the Cannibals." The term was first used in print by
Coney Island and Brooklyn Railroad 1862, so that the line was commonly called the "Smith Street Line". It was also known as the "Slocum Road" after its president, Henry Warner Slocum, a Civil War general and New York congressman. Slocum's name is also associated with the steamboat "General Slocum", involved in a disastrous fire on the East River. Most of the route operated alongside the Coney Island Plank Road, now Coney Island Avenue. In 1890, in order to compete better with the steam railroads that had been opened to Coney Island beginning in 1864, the CI&B became the first horsecar line in Kings County to