Ridgewood is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. It borders the Queens neighborhoods of Maspeth to the north, Middle Village to the east, and Glendale to the southeast, as well as the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bushwick to the southwest and East Williamsburg to the west. Historically, the neighborhood straddled the Queens-Brooklyn boundary.
The etymology of Ridgewood's name is disputed, but it may have referred to Ridgewood Reservoir, the local geography, or a road. The British settled Ridgewood in the 17th century, while the Dutch settled nearby Bushwick. The adjacent settlements led to decades of disputes over the boundary, which later became the border between Queens and Brooklyn. Bushwick was developed rapidly in the 19th century, but Ridgewood remained sparsely populated until the early 20th century, when rowhouses were built for its rapidly growing, predominantly German population. Ridgewood has become more ethnically diverse since the mid-20th century. Large parts of the neighborhood are national and city historic districts.
Ridgewood is patrolled by the New York City Police Department's 104th Precinct. It is represented by the New York City Council's 30th District.Current City Council Districts for Queens County , New York City. Accessed May 5, 2017.
Etymology The origin of the neighborhood's name is disputed. One theory is that it came from the Ridgewood Reservoir in Highland Park, in Brooklyn just south of Ridgewood. The reservoir was on a high ridge in the middle of the Harbor Hill Moraine, a terminal moraine that runs the length of Long Island. Another possible etymology is the forests that covered the area before colonial settlement, and that early English settlers called the moraine the "ridge" of Long Island. Yet another possible etymology is "Ridge Road".
The name was originally applied by the government of Kings County (now coextensive with Brooklyn), and referred to an area within Brooklyn along the border between Kings and Queens Counties. In the early 20th century, developers gave the area various names, including Germania Heights, St. James Park, Ridgewood Heights, Wyckoff Heights, and Knickerbocker Heights, but only "Ridgewood" gained enough popularity past the 1910s.
History Early settlement Ridgewood is adjacent to Bushwick, Brooklyn, and the two neighborhoods have similar histories. According to The New York Times, "Ridgewood and Bushwick used to be merged into one amorphous mass. There was even a Ridgewood, Brooklyn (which is now in Bushwick)", initially settled by the Lenape Native Americans, specifically the Mespachtes tribe (for whom the adjacent neighborhood of Maspeth is named).
In 1638, the Dutch West India Company secured a deed from the Lenape; subsequently, Peter Stuyvesant chartered present-day Bushwick in 1661 under the name Boswijck, meaning "neighborhood in the woods" in 17th-century Dutch.Block, Stock & Barrel . Block Magazine. Likewise, Ridgewood was part of Newtown, one of the three initial towns in Queens, and was settled by the British.
In both neighborhoods, British and Dutch families tilled farms and grew crops for Brooklyn's and Manhattan's markets. Many of these farms also had slaves. The only known remaining Dutch farmhouse in the neighborhood is the Onderdonk House, which was erected in 1709. Also at the Onderdonk House site is Arbitration Rock, a marker for the disputed boundary between Bushwick and Newtown, and by extension Brooklyn and Queens (see ). The land remained rural through the American Revolutionary War, though there may have been a burial ground in the area. Ridgewood's oldest streets are Myrtle Avenue, Metropolitan Avenue, and Fresh Pond Road, which were used by farmers to take their goods to markets. Fresh Pond Road was formerly a Native American trail; the other roads were laid out as plank roads in the early to mid-19th century.
19th-century development The development of public transportation, starting with horse-drawn cars in the mid-19th century and later succeeded by trolleys and elevated trains, helped to spur residential and retail development. The first transit line to arrive in the neighborhood was the Myrtle Avenue horsecar, which was extended to Brooklyn's Broadway in 1855. Following this, the Bay Ridge Branch opened in 1878, connecting to Sheepshead Bay, Manhattan Beach, and the Brooklyn shorefront via the Manhattan Beach Railroad. , June 2006 Edition The Myrtle Avenue elevated railroad, running above Myrtle Avenue within Brooklyn, was extended to the Queens border in 1889. An electric trolley line through Ridgewood, running to Lutheran Cemetery, was opened along a private right-of-way in 1894. Ten years later, the Myrtle Avenue Elevated was extended on a ground level alignment over that trolley line. The current elevated structure would be erected along the Lutheran Cemetery line's right-of-way in 1915.
Simultaneously, northern Brooklyn was seeing an increase in the number of German immigrants. Many of the city's German immigrants had originally settled in Manhattan's Little Germany, located mostly within the East Village and Lower East Side, in the mid-19th century. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, German immigrants had moved to other enclaves such as Yorkville, Manhattan; Steinway, Queens; and the north Brooklyn/Ridgewood area. The discovery of freshwater under northern Brooklyn resulted in the development of breweries, where many Germans worked. By 1880, there were 35 breweries in Brooklyn, including a 14-block "brewer's row" within Bushwick that contained at least 11 breweries. Factories and knitting mills were also opened within the communities, and speculative German developers built houses, consisting mostly of multi-family stock that were three or four stories tall. "Brewer's Row" had grown to 14 breweries by 1890.
20th-century development Residential construction
Ridgewood remained rural until the unification of New York City's boroughs in 1898, even as Bushwick had become fully developed. Development in Ridgewood in the 19th century consisted mostly of picnicking locations, beer gardens, racetracks, and amusement areas for the residents of Bushwick. By the end of the century, developers had bought these sites and started constructing rowhouses and tenements, usually two to three stories high. The Ridgewood Board of Trade, created in 1902, was organized to develop the streets and utilities, and to improve the transit infrastructure.
Much of the housing stock was erected between 1905 and 1915.WPA Guide to New York City: The Federal Writers' Project Guide to 1930s New York. 1939. Most of the houses built before 1905 were wood-frame houses; that year, a zoning ordinance was passed, requiring new buildings to be made of masonry. The area was developed more quickly after the Queensboro Bridge opened in 1909, connecting Queens to Manhattan. According to a 1909 issue of the Real Estate Record and Guide, development was concentrated in a 150-block area around East Williamsburg in Brooklyn, namely the present-day area of Ridgewood. More than five thousand buildings were built from the beginning of the 20th century to World War I's start in the mid-1910s. Residential construction predominated in the southern part of Ridgewood while industrial factories and mills were prevalent in the northern section, near Newtown Creek.
Construction slowed down during World War I, but resumed shortly after the war's end, and by the 1930s the last farmland in Ridgewood had been developed. Some of the later houses were single-family homes with garages. Two of the more drastic changes to Ridgewood's character in the 1920s were the implementation of a street numbering system across Queens in 1925, followed by the opening of the Canarsie subway on the neighborhood's southern border in 1928.
Ethnic changes Ridgewood was among New York City's most quickly-developing neighborhoods between at least 1906 and 1911. Much of the new housing was originally settled by Germans, who had mostly moved from other neighborhoods such as Williamsburg. To the German newcomers, the modern and more expansive houses in Ridgewood provided an improvement over the cramped housing stock in their former neighborhoods. A 1913 Real Estate Record article stated that, for several years, Germans had been moving to Ridgewood from the city's other boroughs. Figures from the 1910 United States census indicated that much of Ridgewood's population was working-class and of German or Eastern European descent, and many homes were owner-occupied. Ridgewood's German population was so large that the Ridgewood Times' first issue in 1908 was published in both English and German.
After World War I, the population expanded with an influx of Gottscheers, an ethnic German population from Slovenia who were dislocated in the aftermath of World War I, and spoke the Gottscheerish dialect. Other Eastern Europeans came as well. As recorded in the 1920 United States census, the population of Ridgewood was mostly working-class homeowners from Germany, Austria, or Italy, with a smaller population from Hungary, Ireland, Poland, and Sweden. The demographic figures remained relatively unchanged through the 1930 United States census. The large German presence led to disputes following the rise of Nazi Germany, and a large, 9,000-person boycott of Nazi Germany in April 1934 resulted in brawls between Nazi sympathizers and about 200 Communists, members of the Anti-Fascist League of Brooklyn, as well as several hundred members of the Blue Shirt Minutemen of Brownsville and members of the Jewish War Veterans League. Still, in the 1939 WPA Guide to New York City, workers for the Federal Writers' Project described Ridgewood and Bushwick as "old-fashioned and respectable", and said that Ridgewood "rivals Manhattan's Yorkville as a German center."
By the 1940 United States census, Southern Europeans were also recorded as having moved into Ridgewood. In the mid-20th century, Romanians, Serbs, and Puerto Ricans arrived. By the late 20th century, Poles, Dominicans,New York Times: "Living in Ridgewood, Queens December 30, 2011"Growing up in Ridgewood, New York in the 1960s–1970s – Part 1" by Gerard Demarigny March 23, 2010Polish Migrations: From Brooklyn to Queens, and back to Europe by Shuka Kalantari and Daniel Macht; retrieved January 1, 2012 and Ecuadorians—including a significant population of Quechua-speaking Amerindians from the Imbabura and Cañar provinces of Ecuador—had moved to Ridgewood. August 2007 Other large populations included Yugoslavians, Chinese, Koreans, and Slovenians.
Ridgewood, Glendale, and neighboring Middlevillage are all home to a large Serbian community with several businesses being located on Forest avenue, There is the Serbian-Romanian Banatul Organization and on Cooper avenue there is the Serbian Association of New York which was founded in 1992, the association also hosts a soccer team.
Late 20th century Originally, "Ridgewood and Bushwick used to be merged into one amorphous mass. There was even a Ridgewood, Brooklyn (which is now in Bushwick)" and they all shared ZIP Code 11237. Following the 1977 blackout, the two communities petitioned for a separate ZIP code to distance themselves from the blight and crime issues affecting Bushwick and other areas of Brooklyn. Residents voted on a proposal to create a new ZIP Code, and a majority of votes were cast in favor of the proposal. The communities were given the ZIP Code 11385 in 1980.
By the mid-1980s, parts of Ridgewood had been given federal landmark designations. Young professionals were moving to the neighborhood in large numbers, and Ridgewood's homeownership rates increased.
Demographics