Opening from On This Site - Native Long Island

Castateum

Castateum is an Indigenous placename recorded for salt meadows near Flatlands in Brooklyn. The marker represents the broader historic meadow landscape rather than a surveyed tract boundary. Castateum preserves a Native name for the Flatlands salt-meadow landscape and recalls the ecological and working importance of coastal grasslands before the modern Brooklyn shoreline took shape. The approximate marker keeps that history visible without pretending that the original meadow tract has been precisely surveyed. Castateum, with recorded forms including Casteteuw and Kestateuw, named one of three salt-meadow flats near Flatlands in early Dutch land records. The records distinguish eastern, middle, and western flats. Modern development and shoreline change make those colonial tract boundaries difficult to reconstruct, so the map uses a broad public-land reference point near the remaining...