The neighborhood now known as Bay Ridge was once part of the Kings County town of New Utrecht, along the shoreline from the southwestern tip of Long Island around 60th Street and Second Avenue to Bay Parkway and Gravesend Bay on the southeast.
Half-Moroccan former pirate Anthony Jansen van Salee (“Anthony the Turk”), and his wife, Grietje Reyniers, a sometime prostitute, were the first non-native settlers of this area. When the couple was banished from New Amsterdam in 1643, they bought a land grant of “100 morgens” (about two hundred acres) along the border of what would become New Utrecht and neighboring Gravesend.
A more formal settlement was organized in 1652 by Cornelius van Werckhoven, an alderman from the City of Utrecht, in the Netherlands. After van Werckhoven's death in 1655, Jacques Cortelyou (ca. 1625–1693), a cartographer who home-schooled his children, led the community, added acreage, and created farming lots.
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