Talk about street smart.

Who woulda thunk that Charles Hercules Ebbets Jr., for whom Ebbets Field and the Ebbets Field Houses were named, was also the guy who invented the baseball rain check, initiated the idea that baseball teams with the worst records should be able to draft first, and who spearheaded the Sunday baseball game?

And I've traveled Hicks St. thousands of times without ever knowing it was named for John Middagh Hicks and Jacob Middagh Hicks, brothers who once operated the sole Brooklyn ferry from Brooklyn Heights - much of which they owned - to Manhattan. Or that their doctor was Dr. Thomas W. Henry, president of the Medical Society of the County of Kings in the 1830, for whom Henry St. is named. (Maybe it's no mistake that my doctor, Dr. John Romanelli, hangs his shingle on Henry St.)

I never knew that Chauncey St., renowned as the birthplace of Jackie Gleason, was named for Isaac Chauncey (1772-1840) a naval officer who served in China and the Mediterranean and who ran the Brooklyn Navy Yard before and after the War of 1812 during which he served in the Great Lakes, only for his street to be known as the stomping ground of The Great One.

What's the history of your Brooklyn neighborhood, park or street?

Find out in a wonderful new book called "Brooklyn by Name: How The Neighborhoods, Streets, Parks, Bridges and More Got their Names," by Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss, a Park Slope husband-and-wife author team who have unearthed some fascinating morsels of Brooklyn history. They've presented an entertaining, breezy compilation for the NYU Press, perfect for reading down at Coney, up on tar beach, or out on your shady front stoop this summer.

From the opening pages, I learned new stuff about my native borough. Like many Brooklynites, I thought Brooklyn was Dutch for "The Broken Land." Wrong! This book tells you, "The Dutch term 'gebroken landt' is actually the translation of the Algonquin name for Long Island and should not be confused with the origin of Brooklyn." Instead, Brooklyn, or Breukelen, "originates with the town in Utrecht, The Netherlands, from which the first Dutch settlers likely arrived."

In Brooklyn that's called Double Dutch.

"Part of the reason for this book, which was a labor of love, was to demystify a lot of these names and myths," says Benardo. "For a short period, I wrote a weekly column for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called "Brooklyn Rediscovered." I did a number of columns on Brooklyn name streets. I've always been fascinated with the history of names, which is called "toponymy." There was a book on the origin of Manhattan street names and on Bronx street names. But nothing on Brooklyn. So my wife and I thought this could be a good contribution."

They didn't want to do just streets - so they also added parks, neighborhoods, bridges. "It's about 70% streets and 30% other things," he says "For example, Erasmus is one of the most celebrated schools in North America but who remembers who Erasmus was? Or who Maimonides was before they named a hospital after him? They're just names that roll off the tongue and we lose sight of who they were."

The authors knew that NYU Press had a sort of subgenre on Brooklyn, as Benardo had written four chapters for NYU Brooklyn walking-tour books. "And they'd done well with the book on Manhattan street names so we approached them with our idea," he says.

So where did they start? "With the unbelievable resources at the Brooklyn Public Library's Brooklyn Collection," says Benardo. "The staff was simply wonderful. And because they have digitized the Daily Brooklyn Eagle up until 1902, it was incredibly helpful. But we also got help from Brooklyn College, where a woman professor from the 1960s, whose name escapes me, assigned about eight or nine of her master's students to do theses on the origin of Brooklyn street names. They were really helpful. And then we probably read every single thing ever written on Brooklyn. In the end there are about 600 entries but it's not a complete list. Not every street or park is in there. But there's room for others to add onto it."

What surprised him most?

"That about 70 to 75 streets are named after Dutch slaveholders," he says. "That's astounding to me. But, as we note in the introduction, Brooklyn, or Kings County, had more slave owners per capita than anywhere else north of the Mason- Dixon line."

He also points out that Corbin Place, around which so many Jews live today, is named after a vile anti-Semite named Austin Corbin (1827-1896) the main developer of Manhattan Beach, builder of subway lines, and president of the Long Island Rail Road.

Corbin opened the luxurious Oriental and Manhattan Beach hotels and was a member of the American Society for the Suppression of Jews and barred them from his premises. "He once remarked," reads the book, "'If this is a free country, why can't we be free of the Jews?'... He died in New Hampshire after a horse threw him from his carriage against a stone wall." Benardo says, "The editors at NYU Press deleted my wife's question after that factlet: "Jewish horse?"

Benardo says his favorite story on why a street name was changed involved DeGraw St. On March 20, 1873, at 731 DeGraw St. between Fifth and Sixth Aves., Lizzie Lloyd King, aka Kaye Stoddard, shot and killed her lover, Charles Goodrich. The murder became a huge, lurid newspaper story as a police manhunt for the spurned lover spread across the city. So notorious was the murder that the stretch of DeGraw St. east of Fifth Ave. was renamed Lincoln Place, after our 16th president and the most celebrated murder victim in United States history.

Talk about Brooklyn logic.

So if you wanna know how Dead Horse Bay, Sheepshead Bay, Floyd Bennett Field, Smith St. Carroll Gardens, Junior's Restaurant, Green-Wood Cemetery, Gilmore Court or the Riegelmann Boardwalk got their names, grab a copy of "Brooklyn by Name" when it hits the bookstores next week on a street near you.