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 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