Ridgewood:
Where Queens Meets Brooklyn
This is Ridgewood
A decade after Parquet Courts immortalized Ridgewood, Queens in song, the relatively low profile of this humble neighborhood has grown exponentially. Whether or not the leap is due in any way, shape, or form to a 2010s post-punk bump, Ridgewood has nonetheless gone from “where?” to the kind of place that’s name-dropped in celebrity interviews, boasts award-winning restaurants, and attracts long-form journalistic pieces.
With attractive architectural character, standout cuisine, and an undeniable connection to its past, Ridgewood redefines hipness. Most recently — and notably — Time Out ranked Ridgewood fourth in its ranking of the world’s coolest neighborhoods, outpacing the likes of Avondale in Chicago, Coconut Grove in South Florida, and Santurce in Puerto Rico as New York City (and state)’s sole representation on the list.
Really, there’s no way to deny the vault Ridgewood has made in the popular consciousness, but it simply didn’t appear out of thin air onto a Google map. Ridgewood’s history long predates its current moment of trendiness — where current apartment rentals range from approximately $2,600 for a studio to around $3,500 for a four-bedroom, and multi-family home sales hover between slightly under $1,000,000 to nearly $2,000,000.* Its roots are strong and deep, extending to before the formal formation of New York City.
With attractive architectural character, standout cuisine, and an undeniable connection to its past, Ridgewood redefines hipness.
Some of Ridgewood’s busiest thoroughfares have experienced multi-generational bustle. The Mespeatches people once used Fresh Pond Road as a trail toward fishing and clamming in Jamaica Bay. Later, Long Island farmers traversed over Metropolitan Avenue to the waterfront markets. Stagecoaches rolled across Myrtle Avenue on the way to Brooklyn’s ferries.
Ridgewood’s last vestige of its pre-metropolitan past is the Vander–Ende Onderdonk House on Flushing Avenue. Dating to 1709, it is the oldest surviving Dutch fieldstone house in NYC (a lot of qualifiers, but impressive nonetheless) and now operates as a museum — a genuine relic standing out among the adjacent industrial warehouse wholesalers. The house’s grounds are also where you’ll find Arbitration Rock, a substantial stone believed to be over 10,000 years old that once served as the official boundary marker between the towns of Bushwick and Newtown. Wait, where?
Setting Boundaries
In some ways, the dream of the tree-lined Brooklyn street is alive in Queens. But please don’t think of Ridgewood as “Bushwick North,” nor let the profane portmanteau “Ridgewick” cross your lips. Walk north in Bushwick along Troutman or Palmetto, and the shift to Ridgewood won’t be noticeable. There is no welcome sign, no passport stamp to receive, and no questions to answer before a troll lets you cross a bridge (there is also no bridge).
Particularly near their dividing line, Ridgewood’s and Bushwick’s residential architecture is remarkably similar. That resplendent resemblance is primarily due to the influence of one man. If it’s built from brick in Ridgewood, Louis Berger very likely designed it. Groupings of visually cohesive homes stack blocks upon blocks of the neighborhood. In total, Berger is credited with developing an improbable-sounding 5,000+ buildings in the greater area from 1895 to 1930.
After taking architecture classes at the Pratt Institute, Berger apprenticed with Carrère and Hastings, the firm famously behind the New York Public Library Main Branch building and private commissions like Henry Flagler’s Whitehall Estate (now the Flagler Museum) in Palm Beach). He would then work as an architect for the G.X. Mathews Company, whose namesake was buying up Ridgewood land to construct his Mathews Model Flats. Mathews’s reinterpretation of Manhattan’s infamously cramped and inhospitable tenements incorporated plumbing, air, and light flow and was flexible to different lot sizes. These homes were also arranged to include six rooms, including a kitchen, living room, and full bath.
Brick By Brick
The Strand, a new 132-unit rental on Woodward Ave. between Troutman and Starr Streets, boasts amenities like dual roof terraces, a gym, and a co-working center.
Before Queens became part of NYC in 1898, today’s largest borough consisted of multiple towns. One such settlement was Newtown (of no relation to the main thoroughfare in East Hampton) — humans weren’t always the most creative when naming places — which encompassed modern-day Ridgewood. Several names rose and fell across the early years, including Evergreen, Germania Heights, and Knickerbocker Heights, before Ridgewood triumphed as the tag of choice. That name is thought to originate from either the Ridgewood Reservoir, now part of Highland Park in Brooklyn, or the area’s physical location in a wooded region along the ridge of Long Island.
Like with neighborhoods across the city, Ridgewood’s growth closely followed public transportation expansions and improvements. Over time, this rural area dedicated to farming potatoes, corn, and cauliflower gave way to the inexorable march of urbanization. The previously mentioned stagecoach service to the ferries arrived in the 1840s, and the construction of elevated trains from the 1880s through 1915 (encompassing today’s J, M, and Z lines) connected Queens to North Brooklyn and Manhattan.
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Ridgewood redefines hipness
Despite its stone’s-throw proximity to Bushwick and East Williamsburg, Ridgewood
is every bit a Queens original — with the hyphenated addresses to prove it.
by JEREMY KLEIN
Berger took Mathews’ model and ran with it, helping craft Ridgewood’s aesthetic appeal. He favored the Renaissance Revival style and used light-colored, fire-resistant bricks sourced from Staten Island’s Kreischer Brick Company to achieve his vision. His facades sport arched window openings and ornamental lintels and are often capped by elaborate cornices. Some buildings are bow-fronted, others flat-fronted. Stoops can be a low-rising set of four steps or a steep collection of 12; they can lead to handsome double doors or columned front porches. At corner lots, there is often a storefront or restaurant on the ground floor. Individual blocks feel distinct from one another, but there’s never a sense that you’ve drifted off the Ridgewood course.
Whatever the style choice, extensive swaths of Ridgewood are preserved across its 10 nationally-recognized historic districts and four city-designated landmark districts. And it’s not just Berger’s work that maintains its captivating character. Louis Allmendinger — architect of Greenpoint’s ornate Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Transfiguration of Our Lord — worked as a G.X. Mathews architect, and trails only Berger in his Ridgewood portfolio. Joseph Weiss & Co. developed the one-block cluster of Beaux-Arts rowhouses that encompass the Stockholm Street Historic District and sit along the only brick-paved street left in Queens.
All of which is to say, Ridgewood maintains an enchanting “stuck in time” element — which is not to say the neighborhood hasn’t progressed in the century-plus since Louis Berger laid his first brick. The community blooms, yet it does not lose sight of where it grew from.
Part of what makes Ridgewood remarkable is that its past remains very much part of its present. Everything comes from somewhere. Why tear up the paper when the lines are already there, ready for the next person to color them in?
Let’s start with a tradition as American as baseball: beer. (Fittingly enough, the Brooklyn Dodgers played in Ridgewood on Sundays during the late 1880s to get around Brooklyn’s restrictive blue laws). Neighboring Bushwick was well-known in the late 19th and early 20th century for its “Brewers Row,” a 14-block section that purportedly accounted for 30% of the country’s beer business.
Present Past
Find Your Place in Ridgewood
If you’re thinking what we’re thinking — that all of this does, in fact, fit into the clinical definition of “cool” — then you’ll probably want to know how to get to Ridgewood. For most, the simplest solution to moving through the area is aboard the M or L trains. Two M stations fall firmly within the neighborhood’s bounds at Seneca Avenue and Fresh Pond Road. However, Myrtle-Wyckoff Avenues and Metropolitan Avenue should also count, as they straddle Ridgewood’s respective borders with Bushwick and Middle Village. Myrtle-Wyckoff also has L service, and stops on that line at Halsey, Dekalb, and Jefferson are all within varying degrees of walking distance.
Another fact across the city that’s especially valid in Ridgewood: Buses are the unsung heroes of public transit. It’s no secret traveling from Queens and Brooklyn via subway is a chore — the G only wields so much power. Leave it then to the B38 and B52 routes to link Ridgewood from Bedford-Stuyvesant through Fort Greene and all the way to Brooklyn Heights. For a westward expedition, hop on the Q39 to Long Island City or the Q54 to Williamsburg.
Short of owning a car that you have to move four times a week for street cleanings, the bus is also Ridgewood’s least complicated route to accessing Highland Park. Climb aboard an eastbound B13 and touch down on the greater area’s greenest space. Highland Park sits atop a plateau, affording views over the Ridgewood Reservoir while supplying opportunities for athletic endeavors — including pickleball — birdwatching, and barbecuing.
But the best way to experience Ridgewood is to experience Ridgewood. Take a $5 tour of the Vander–Ende Onderdonk House. Treat yourself to a full day’s worth of dining out, dessert included. Chat with and get to know the people. Walk around enough, and you’re sure to stumble across and adore something you never expected. Or, at the least, you can pass by Grimaldi Bakery on the corner of Menahan and Grandview and inhale the intoxicating scents of freshly-baked bread. Now there’s something everyone can agree is cool.
Getting There
During the late 19th century, planners laid down a street grid. Unfortunately for them, their predecessors seemed to put as much creativity and forward-thinking into their job as went into naming Newtown. The Newtown-Bushwick border line was drawn in 1769 as a straight diagonal line from Arbitration Rock. With the introduction of the grid, that boundary now bisected individual home lots and introduced massive headaches.
By the early twentieth century, unlucky folks living in houses divided between Kings and Queens were paying taxes to both counties. Bushwick water came from the city, whereas Ridgewood’s supply came from a third-party company that charged exorbitant rates (leading to its official condemnation in 1924). And in a nightmarish scenario, Brooklyn utilized the city’s fire department while Queens relied on a volunteer brigade — who decides who comes to the rescue when a building between the borderline catches fire? This was not fine.
Common sense eventually prevailed in 1925 when the diagonal was redrawn to match the street grid, tossing out the boulder-based border. This formed an irregularly-shaped boundary that today only contributes to the literal and metaphorical blurring of where Ridgewood ends and Bushwick begins.
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Ridgewood maintains an enchanting “stuck in time” element.
Ridgewood also had a big piece of that hop-spiced pie: Welz & Zerweck, the neighborhood’s most prosperous brewery, filled four acres at its height, manufacturing some 500,000 barrels of beer annually. They were best known for pilsners, which were oft-consumed at picnic parks — predecessors to today’s beer gardens and taprooms — in neighboring Glendale. Prohibition effectively wiped out Bushwick’s and Ridgewood’s beer culture, and the industry seemingly ended for good in 1976 when former stalwarts Schaeffer’s and Rheingold closed their doors. Thanks to America’s recent craft brewing renaissance, however, Ridgewood has since reconnected with its sudsy roots. Three breweries in its easternmost reaches — Bridge and Tunnel Brewery, Queens Brewery, and the world-renowned Evil Twin Brewing — lie within three blocks of each other. From a lobster saison to no-frills pils, a fruited sour to a single-hop IPA with a name so long it breaks to three lines, the options pour plentiful for lagerheads and hazebros alike.
Like brewing, knitting and textiles were other dominant Ridgewood industries. Inside the old digs of a fabric-maker lies TV Eye, a multi-functional music venue/community center/art gallery/restaurant, if you’re in the area and craving tacos. There’s always something different and fresh happening across TV Eye’s many rooms, but there’s one constant: the c.1930 floors, a remnant from its textile past that today serves the aesthetic, acoustic, and dancing-all-night demands of this self-described “funhaus.“
Many of Ridgewood’s present-day businesses, especially its eateries, are named after people. Whether those namesakes ever lived in Ridgewood or not, it conveys this sense of learning from and honoring a grand shared past. Rudy’s Bakery and Cafe stands in the same spot on Catalpa Avenue as when it opened in 1934, serving up German specialties like a delectable raspberry and cheese strudel and its renowned Black Forest cake. Meanwhile, Mano’s Pizzeria arrived into an already robust scene in 2021 and yet offers some of the area’s most stupendous slices — owing partly to a five-day dough fermentation process — from its corner shop on Forest Avenue.
Morscher’s Pork Store, also on Catalpa, has kept the neighborhood butcher shop archetype alive for over 75 years, maintaining customers with decades-long tabs for bologna, hot dogs, and various smoked meats.
Rolo’s boasts a trio of wood-fired polenta breads that would break even the staunchest of keto diets. The restaurant’s menu is ever-evolving, with mainstays that are mainstays for a reason — like the double cheeseburger, standing tall at $18 and sporting grilled onions, dijonnaise, pickled long hot peppers, and (for an extra $3) bacon. Much acclaim has followed Rolo’s to its outpost on the corner of Onderdonk and Cornelia, including Michelin’s Bib Gourmand award.
Norma’s Corner Shoppe for sandwiches and bundt cakes, Julia’s for a sweet potato hash and michelada-filled Sunday brunch, Milo’s Yard for pints and pinball; the list goes on. And that’s all without mentioning standouts with monikers not derived from people’s names, like seasonal favorite Ice Cream Window (which speaks for itself), the Nepali flavors of While in Kathmandu, the near-century-long presence of Gottscheer Hall, or the dozens more waiting for you to step through their door.
The best way to experience Ridgewood
is to experience Ridgewood.
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Right off the Halsey L stop, the loft warehouse at 1630 George Street offers inspiring creative space with the possibility for residential conversion.
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