the last book I ever read (The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, excerpt one)

from The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever by Prudence Peiffer:

Coenties Slip is almost certainly named after an early colonial settler: Coenraedt Ten Eyck, a shoemaker and tanner who comes to the New World in 1651 with his second wife, Annetje. (One of the first zoning ordinances of Manhattan forces cobblers out of downtown in the 1640s due to their noxious fumes and dyes polluting the precious fresh water.) Coenraedt and Annetje have ten children. (In the nineteenth century, property on the Slip is still in the family.) According to a Dutch West India Company map, Coenraedt’s original village plot is northwest, just off the central marsh and sheep’s pasture, but they move east to the area around the Slip, which then becomes known as “Coentje’s”—a casual contraction of “Coenraedt and Annetje’s.” Everyone pronounces it “Co-en-tees,” but the artist Willem de Kooning once told Jack Youngerman that in Dutch, the name would be pronounced “Coonties.”