In Thomas Wolfe’s 1935 short story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn,” the narrator is dumbfounded when, on a platform of what is now the R line, he meets a man who wants to go to Bensonhurst simply out of curiosity to see what the various districts of this vast borough look like. The man is carrying, of all things, a map. Speaking in Wolfe's impression of the then prevailing Brooklyn accent, the narrator expresses his astonishment:

“Wit dat, he pulls it out of his pocket, an’ so help me, but he’s got it—he’s telling duh troot—a big map of the whole f------ place with all duh different pahts mahked out. You know—Canarsie am’ East Noo Yawk an’ Flatbush, Bensonhoist, Sout’ Brooklyn, duh Heights, Bay Ridge, Greenpernt—duh whole goddam layout, he’s got it right deh on duh map.”

Brian Merlis and Lee A. Rosenzweig have already done Bensonhurst, as well as Flatbush, Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg, and more than a handful of Brooklyn's other storied communities. And now they’ve come out with Canarsie on Jamaica Bay: Brooklyn’s Last Village. As with their other books, they have collected a trove of vintage photographs to bring back the feeling of an earlier day, as well as bringing the history of the community up to date.

With Ira M. Kluger as historical consultant and Dr. Joy Holland as editorial advisor, Merlis and Rosenzweig summarize Canarsie's history from 1647, when, in the first recorded reference to it by that name, Canarsie was applied to the Canarsee Indians living there, possibly in a corruption of the French word canard, meaning duck. French trappers, seeing tattoos of ducks on the native inhabitants, are supposed to have referred to them as the duck people. Canarsie was the last section of western Long Island to be sold to Europeans, in a 1665 deed by the Canarsee to the Dutch. An early Dutch landmark was the Nicholas Schenck homestead built about 1775, which remained as a working farm until 1885, when the last Schenck in the line died without issue. After another family lived there into the 1890s, the house fell into disrepair. Efforts to restore it in the 1920s were set back when a 1923 gale blew off part of the roof; parts of the interior finally wound up installed in the Brooklyn Museum. A photograph in the book shows a group of apparently leading citizens in brimmed hats and overcoats soberly looking at the rather skeletal remains of the house in 1928.

Other photographs—of shops, of free-standing homes, of churches, of trolley cars, of vintage automobiles, of a white-clad patriotic assembly of women at Canarsie Beach Park in 1920—will bring back memories to older Brooklynites. There is an interesting 1923-24 photo of the raised Municipal Pier (later Canarsie Pier), which shows a small steamboat floating on a water level many feet above the sea level where two larger ships are seen. A startling ca. 1940 photo is that of a partly draped dead body in the Sand Pits with legs and an arm sticking out almost casually.

The historical account is not limited to the area’s more sentimental side but also discusses the ethnic and racial tensions that have arisen there in more recent decades, like the local Italian population resisting a Jewish influx in the 1950s and ‘60s, and the fire-bombing of Fillmore Real Estate after the agency had shown homes to prospective black home buyers. On a happier note, Canarsie in 2008 celebrated its resident Sadam Ali, a lightweight boxer, making the U.S. Olympic team.

Brooklyn-born Brian Merlis, now based in Freeport, Long Island, has been building up a photographic archive for years. He has published some books on his own, but most of them in collaboration with Lee Rosenzweig, who also has been amassing a collection. Together they have preserved an important and impressive part of the Brooklyn record. In his introduction to the present volume, Merlis recalls going with his mother in their shiny ‘64 Volvo to pick up his dad from work at the then new Canarsie High School, and making a “bumpy ride through semi-paved streets lined with lots broken by an occasional house whose ground floor was on what I had expected to be basement level.”