- In which I introduce the idea that Ridgewood is really cool, why you will make of that what you will
- In which I learn what an Intermodal Terminal is and walk below the train (one of those modes) tracks
- In which I make my way east on Myrtle Avenue, noticing condo-theaters, a World War I memorial, a few weed dispensaries, and an old-school European pastry shop
- In which I tell a teeny-tiny lie and eat great pizza
- In which I marvel at New York’s amazing juxtapositions of old and new – in this case, historic districts, Balkan and Slavic immigrants and hipsters
- In which I ogle the beautiful and cozy houses of worship in the area, each serving a different population, not just denomination
- In which I rest at the local library branch, and hear the fight song from I.S. 093, the middle school across the street
- In which I discover the Gottscheer community, or ex-community, a group of German-ish (more precisely, Gottscheerish) speakers from present-day Slovenia who settled here after World War II but who have now largely disappeared from the neighborhood
- In which I dig the Clevelands: Grover Cleveland High School and Grover Cleveland Playground; and in which I see the Manhattan skyline and learn the architectural term “super-tall”
- In which I note the gentrified parts of the neighborhood, especially as it approaches Bushwick, noticeable by (among other things) the font of their house numbers
- In which I visit the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House, the oldest Dutch fieldstone house in NYC
- In which I return to Ridgewood, arriving by bus, on which I eavesdrop on a young girl telling her friend about her shoes and her new beau
- In which I visit Paradise Pet Store and Drew Berry Leatherworks, preferring the former but finding both really charming
Ridgewood, Queens is a sort of a Rorschach test of New York City. Immigrant community? Yes. Historic landmarks and architectural preservation? You bet. Mom and pop shops? Parks and vistas? Convenient mass transit? Hipster amenities? You wouldn’t be wrong about any of these, and maybe your conclusion would say more about you than about Ridgewood.
It’s worth noting that in 2022, Time Out New York called Ridgewood “the fourth coolest neighborhood in the world,” just behind neighborhoods in Guadalajara, Mexico; Lisbon; and Siem Reap, Cambodia. Cool’s definition is subjective, though…a sort of, well, Rorschach test.
I decided to check out this pick-your-own-neighborhood neighborhood. Whatever you see in Ridgewood, I think you’ll agree it’s great.
Ridgewood isn’t very large, but I still only covered a portion of it all in my half-day visit. Bounded by Metropolitan Avenue on the north, Shaler Avenue and Highland Park on the east, and Wyckoff and Cypress Avenues on its southeast-northwest hypotenuse, it’s a triangular parcel with a whole lot of low-rise housing, local retail and pretty much whatever you need to live comfortably – all within a 40-minute subway ride from Grand Central. About 70,000 people call Ridgewood home.
And Ridgewood is cool.
Meandering on Myrtle
I took the L train to the Myrtle-Wyckoff station, on the border of Bushwick (and thus the border of Brooklyn[1]). The track is elevated, and since 2016, the area under the tracks (more precisely on Wyckoff) has been pedestrianized, with a few food trucks and a smattering of tables and chairs, all full on this gorgeous day. (Reclaim our streets!) It took considerable inner strength to resist the aromatic taco and gyro food trucks parked mid-street as I headed toward my planned lunch venue.
Just off the corner of Wyckoff and Myrtle is a small shed-like structure with a sign that reads “Ridgewood Intermodal Terminal.” No one was there to explain what an intermodal terminal was, but I subsequently learned that it opened in 2010, to considerable fanfare, to mark the connection of the L and M trains and to facilitate the transfer to several bus lines. (Which I could have surmised from the name, duh.) Before 2010, the L and M trains operated separately, with one station that dated from 1889 (admittedly with numerous updates), and a second station that opened in 1924. The 2010 marriage delivered great convenience to residents of Ridgewood, Maspeth and Middle Village, who are now more easily connected to Manhattan and other parts of Queens via co-located train and bus service.
The area under the tracks is visually arresting on a sunny day, with the slats from the tracks allowing a geometric play of sunlight and shadow on the street. I’m normally a cautious pedestrian, but here, an oncoming car honked at me impatiently as I stood in the middle of the street photographing the dazzling display. I also admired a mural on the block unveiled last year. It’s called From Absence, and was painted by Ruth Hofheimer as a tribute to three pedestrians killed at the intersection. The descriptive plaque reads “May their deaths help produce safer streets for future generations.” Amen to that.
I walked for about ten blocks along Myrtle Avenue, Ridgewood’s principal (but by no means only) commercial thoroughfare. Most of the shops were local, but I saw franchises too, especially fast food. A pretty typical outer-borough shopping street. The neighborhood is almost half Latino, 37% white and close to 10% Asian, which was consistent with my sidewalk observations. Ridgewood Latinos are diverse, with about 14.5% Caribbean (Puerto Rican and Dominican), 12% South American (Ecuadorean, Colombian) and 4% Mexican.[2] White residents include significant numbers of immigrants too, as well as next-gen Ridgewooders who identify with the country of their family’s origin – 11.4% Italian and 10.4% from Poland alone.
I passed a restaurant called El Dorado, clearly owned by an immigrant because its prices were listed in “USD.” Consider yourself warned in case you’d planned to pay in any other currency.
The old Beaux-Arts style Ridgewood Theater at 55-27 Myrtle, whose marquee juts out provocatively along the avenue, opened in 1916 as a venue for live entertainment. In the 1980s, United Artists purchased it and converted it to a movie house, which it remained until 2008. It was landmarked two years later. In 2016 it became…drumroll…luxury rentals! The community pushed back, arguing for a use consistent with the building’s entertainment origins, but no one else bit, and the developers ultimately succeeded. The photos of the new residences are beautiful, and they don’t come cheap. (A two-bedroom, 1-1/2 bath unit is now going for $3,650, considerably above average for the neighborhood.) In 2018, Blink Fitness opened at street level, and its name pops out boldly, and may I say without elegance, on the marquee.
A World War I memorial – a pocket park with a statue and a memorial identifying it as Ridgewood Remembrance – sits at the corner of Myrtle and Cypress Avenues. It commemorates the 110 Ridgewood residents who died in that bloody war. You can find more than 100 WWI memorials in New York City; it’s the most memorialized war in our town. Today, only the pigeons paid it any mind.
Just off Myrtle, on Seneca Street, is Rudi’s Pastry Shop (905 Seneca Avenue), an iconic Ridgewood eatery in business since 1934. Originally a German bakery, Rudi’s was purchased by an Italian family in 1980, but the owners have largely retained the central European menu, with a small nod to their home and their new neighbors. In addition to strudel and fruit turnovers, you can now find black and white cookies and Latin American alfajores. The display of goodies looks and smells sublime. In 2016, the New York Times admired Rudy’s in a “Neighborhood Joint” column, supplementing (or driving?) oodles of online chatter about the place.
Determined to return after lunch, I withstood the temptation to buy something then. Ach, my route took me elsewhere and I never made it. However, I am not above planning a return visit around a bakery. I’ll be back.
I continued along Myrtle, passing a shop that urged me to “Buy Weed from Women” – a licensed dispensary playing jazz that wafted (pun intended) onto the street. Across the street is the OMG Dispensary, presumably unlicensed, and perhaps owned by men?
And OMG – next to OMG was a second location of Parrot Coffee Marketplace, the Balkan goods store I’d visited so enthusiastically in Sunnyside. It made more sense in Ridgewood, with its large Slavic population. I was excited to see it. It felt like seeing an old friend.
I passed many, many pizza joints. But I had come for one and one alone: Joe and John’s, serving slices and pies since 1968. Several websites highlighted it as a must-try when in the area. I am here to confirm the hype! The highlight was the mushroom slice. The mushrooms were so insanely delicious I almost thought they were infused with truffles, or some culinary equivalent of gold. The crust was thin and just slightly sweet, and the cheese – oh, the cheese. My palate was raw for several days because I was so impatient to chow down on those ‘shrooms that I couldn’t be bothered to wait for the cheese to cool. (You know what I’m talking about, pizza palate piggies!) A veritable column of melted mozzarella and seasoned mushrooms extended from my mouth to the plate – and I couldn’t find any forks, despite strategically seating myself next to a napkin dispenser. Luckily, most of the other customers were lost in their own thoughts, or phones, or watching the Mets game on the TV mounted near the kitchen (first inning, but P.S., we won). If anyone captured me on camera in my full cheesy ignominy, I’d prefer not to know.
I may have told the friendly employees a little fib. I said I’d come from Manhattan to try the pizza. Did I visit Ridgewood solely for the pizza? No. But I think that ethically, I’m in the clear, since I did read about J&Js, and decide to try a slice, before I left my home in Manhattan. And how gratifying the reward was – the employees’ delight when I shared this teeny-tiny exaggeration! Or did I simply imagine that they would care about a stupid Manhattanite’s opinion? I have to admit they were a little cavalier – could it have been snarky? – when they asked, almost parenthetically, “Worth the trip?” as I was leaving. But one employee reassured me I’d selected the right topping, and another guy made sure I knew that they cooked the mushrooms every single day, with high-quality olive oil, salt and pepper. And here I am, spreading the word. So I think we’re good.
Myrtle Ave. in Ridgewood looks like many ungentrified (I should probably say “pre-gentrified”) NYC neighborhoods, with local shops and food franchises and faded awnings. But make no mistake: hip has arrived. After lunch, I visited areas where pre- and post- are on full display.
On Forest Avenue, I visited two bodegas where not a half-caf soy latte was to be found. The first, Forest Polish Grocery & Deli (58-49 69th Avenue), was a brightly-lit collection of goods from its namesake country, organized into neat aisles. Merchandise included an aisle of pickled everything, a full shelf of various brands and sizes of sauerkraut (which is fermented, not pickled), a display case of Polish sausage, freshly baked dark bread from a local bakery, and a wide selection of Polish-language newspapers, including at least one of the two New York-based weeklies. The second shop, Euro Food Market Max (68-55 Forest Ave.), was quite different. When I arrived, the owner was chatting outside with a neighbor. She returned to her post behind the counter when I entered, welcoming me as I browsed the dark and dusty shelves of Balkan products. A whole shelf of ajvar (red pepper spread) brightened one wall. The refrigerated display featured shelves of charcuterie – various meats unidentifiable to me but certainly known to regular customers. I purchased some “hot ajvar” (spoiler alert: it’s not very hot, but it is tasty) and spoke with the woman a bit. Her English was limited, but I understood that most of her customers were from Serbia, Romania and other Balkan countries (not Poland, she clarified – I assume Poles shop across the street). I asked if they were older immigrants or more recent. She thought they’d been here, in general, for “12 or 13 years.” Even if she’s off by a few years, that makes them part of a decades-old immigration trend.
These Balkan and Polish immigrants, while by no means the dominant ethnic group in Ridgewood these days, replaced Germans as the newest European immigrants to the area in the middle of the 20th century. Ridgewood, along with nearby Glendale and Middle Village, are still known for the substantial German communities that settled there from the 1880s until World War II. Most have either died or moved away, including their descendants. New immigrants from Eastern Europe continue to move to the area today (shopping at Euro Food Market Max, I hope) and I read somewhere that Ridgewood has the highest concentration of Slavic immigrants in the U.S. I can’t find the cite, so I’m just putting it out there for your consideration, even though a few other parts of the country seem like more likely candidates for this distinction.
More recently, in addition to Slavic immigrants, the neighborhood has seen arrivals from Egypt, Nepal, China and throughout Latin America, and, it must be said, from nearby Williamsburg and Bushwick, where priced-out (mostly white) young people are pushing the boundaries of coffee shops, craft beer venues, performance spaces and vintage clothing stores well into Ridgewood. (This pretty silly crowdsourced map from 2017, based on a self-selecting group of respondents, classifies Ridgewood as “pre-hipster,” but my observation is that it’s a work in progress with microneighborhoods much as you would find with enclaves of immigrants from other countries. Plus, what a difference seven years make.)
Speaking of which, at the far corner of a block of Eastern European hair salons, food shops and locals chatting outdoors in the sun, was Norma’s Corner Shoppe, a hipster venue full of conspicuously made-up, heavily inked young women in skirts of all lengths. One notably tat-free woman was frantic about having tied her dog up outdoors while she waited for an overpriced coffee drink. She apologized profusely to her pup through the door. Finally, brandishing her chai latte in one hand and untying her dog’s leash with the other (no mean feat), she looked admiringly at a guy seated in the Shoppe’s concrete garden. “I love your tattoos,” she mooned. “If I weren’t so afraid of permanence, I’d get some too.” I hope she’ll keep her doggie for all of eternity.
Preservation Habitations
I was now ready to visit some of the five Ridgewood districts which, since 1983, have been designated official landmarks by the NYC Landmarks Commission, one by one. This makes Ridgewood the landmark-iest neighorhood in Queens, if not all of New York City! The Commission provides printable maps of each district (thanks to some nifty software launched in 2020), noting the actual parcels within each one. I picked the North and South Ridgewood districts.
In Ridgewood, it’s pretty clear which blocks are landmarked and which are not. So many of the homes on the unprotected blocks are covered by aluminum siding. I don’t know if the owners of the landmarked structures rue the regulations that govern the maintenance of their properties or turn up their noses at their neighbors’ modern façade-savers. But no doubt they know that their protected historic block-long rowhouses are stunning. Most were constructed between 1900 and World War I as either single-family dwellings or duplexes, using yellow, brown or red brick from the kilns in Kreischerville, Staten Island. More than 5,000 units were constructed during that time. They have imaginative cornices and other details. The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s “designation reports” to include them as NYC landmarks are worth reading for their thorough research, and their appreciation of the buildings’ architectural and sociohistorical significance.[3] Their owners obviously take pride in their homes and their yards, which they feature well-maintained details such as window frames, front stoops, and, on some blocks, even front “yards” (typically concrete areas enclosed by wrought-iron fences, with plants and other decorative items, even a table and chairs if space permits).
On Woodward Avenue, Old meets New. Topos Bookstore, a one-room collection of new and used books and (what else?) an espresso bar, is a meeting spot for the newer community. A sign over the doorway, adorned with images of flowers and a dove, proclaims “PALESTINE WILL BE FREE.” This announcement presages the display just inside – a small collection of nonfiction by Palestinian and other Arab writers. (I noted that the store also sells books by Jewish Israeli authors.) The inventory was smaller than I’d imagined from online descriptions, but still had hundreds of books of all genres.
Topos isin’t the only coffee bar in town, not by a long shot (heh heh). Several others in the area reveal the area’s in-full-swing gentrification. And there are times when a full-on hipster coffee joint is welcome. I enjoyed a cold brew at Bakeri Queens, a recently opened Norwegian-owned café with Scandinavian and Latin American pastry. (The guy at the counter, who appeared to be neither, indicated that the baked goods are the brainchildren of the people who work there, though I imagine Nordic veto power prevails.)
Ridgewood may not be among the NYC communities with the highest concentration of churches, but it does not want for houses of worship. Within a few blocks, I found some that captured my attention. You really can’t overlook the imposing 1924 Church of St. Matthias and Catholic Academy (58-15 Catalpa Avenue), with its tall steeple and adjacent school, built in the Italian Renaissance Revival style and now part of the Ridgewood South Historic District. The school needs your help! The church is trying to raise a million dollars this year to wipe clean its debt and prevent closure after the current school year.
And: the lovely stone Safe Haven United Church of Christ (601 Onderdonk Avenue), a congregation led by six women pastors. The church invites congregants to pursue the same transformative holy experiences that led its leadership to their current posts.
And: nearby St. Mary and St. Antonios Coptic Orthodox Church (606 Woodward), which holds services officiated by three Egyptian-born priests, and serves, according to its website, over 1,000 Coptic families. The church claims to be the first Coptic Orthodox parish in North America, one of 200 in the U.S. Services are livestreamed and take place in English, Arabic and Coptic. After the upheaval that toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and ushered in, temporarily, the Muslim Brotherhood, St. Mary and St. Antonios saw a spike in new congregants – specifically, new immigrants fleeing anti-Copt violence. The church became a welcome center and adjusted its programming to integrate the older and newer groups. As is the case with many religious communities, it does double duty as a house of worship and a community center, even if its congregants live elsewhere.[4] In 2018, the Coptic Orthodox Pope, Tawadros II, visited New York City and paid a visit to St. Mary and St. Antonios, the greatest honor a Coptic congregation could ask for.
After a mile or so of meandering through the historic blocks, I backtracked a little in order to visit the Queens Library at Ridgewood. The library, which opened in 1929, is a nondescript room with a modest collection. Not surprisingly, its foreign language shelves are substantial. They include Russian, Serbian and Polish as well as Spanish and Chinese. While I rested in the library’s comfortable upholstered chairs, I could hear kids from next-door I.S. 093 – by this time in the afternoon, likely an after-school sports team – screaming their fight song. Their energy was infectious and I found myself nodding to the rhythm of their chant.
As I was leaving the library, the security guard proudly showed me the bustle of adolescent activity in the library’s lower level – an after-school program for teens. How great is that! (After-school programs typically end after middle school…just when kids most need to be engaged.)
Intermediate School Oh-nine-three, as the fight song called it, is lucky to have the library across the street. In addition to the basement-level youth program, a third of the main room is designated for teens (and aren’t at least a third of the middle school kids teens?). In addition, across the street is Rosemary’s Playground, named after an early resident, Rosemary Gunning, the first woman from Queens to be elected to the New York State Assembly. Gunning served from 1968-76. I was delighted that the playground was named for a community contributor and not a victim of some local tragedy, as is sometimes the case.
Fairview to Grandview
With the elevated M train behind me (the stop is Forest Avenue), I once again walked northwest. I wanted to see a relic of a little-known community prominent at one point in Ridgewood: the Gottscheers. These were immigrants from an area located in modern-day Slovenia. Before the Second World War, their home was called Gottschee, their now-endangered language, Gottscheerisch. Forced by the Third Reich to relocate to German-controlled territory, they lost their homes when the war ended, and were resettled in refugee camps. In the 1950s, many emigrated to the U.S., joining earlier generations of Gottscheers, as immigrants typically do. In Ridgewood they formed a significant community – the largest Gottscheer community anywhere. For a while they continued to speak their language and sustain some of their culture, organizing Gottscheer dance troupes and teaching Gottscheerisch to their children. But eventually they assimilated, intermarrying with non-Gottscheers and ultimately emigrating again, this time to the suburbs. Today all that remains are a couple of German-sounding business names, and the catering hall called Gottscheer Hall (657 Fairview Avenue). Gottscheer Hall itself is a modest brick building built in 1962 when the community had outgrown its previous club space. It boasts bright blue awnings proclaiming its name and the kinds of events it caters (“WEDDINGS,” “PARTIES”). It’s also a restaurant with a German menu, and rumor has it some of Ridgewood’s newest residents (think: hipsters) have started to frequent it. I loved the vertical sign over the door – GOTTSCHEERS, it announces elegantly and unambiguously, with “Hall” as a postscript across the bottom.
Rumors abound that Melania Trump is Gottsheer-American. If so, she’s definitely the community’s biggest celebrity this side of the Atlantic. As is the case with most of Melania’s mysteries, though, she’s not saying. Or maybe she doesn’t care. Do you?
From Gottscheer Hall it’s only eight blocks to the mammoth Grover Cleveland High School. Built during the Depression, Cleveland was one of seven schools built in the city using the same blueprint to save money. (Among them was my father’s alma mater, Samuel J. Tilden High School, in Brooklyn.) Its alumni include actress Rosie Perez and storied sportscaster Jim Gordon of Rangers and Giants fame. Marshall Drew, a teacher at Cleveland for 36 years, survived the sinking of the Titanic at age 8, according to a charming video about the school. Grover Cleveland, at the time of my visit, the only person ever to serve non-consecutive terms as President of the United States, never lived in the area, but until the current century, civics dictated that naming schools after presidents was the respectable thing to do, and most communities did. If I were naming Cleveland High School today, I might call it the Rosie Perez School, or possibly the Rosemary Gunning School, or maybe just Your Basic Blueprint School.
Across from the school is the Glover Cleveland Playground, which, despite its name, is really a park with a large playground at its center. The park was originally known as Anawanda Park after the Anawanda Democratic Club (a local Tammany Hall political organization). The City changed the park’s name in 1939, because Cleveland, as governor of New York, had been critical of the machine. This enraged the local pols, but Cleveland’s name stuck. The playground itself is expansive and fanciful, and on this gorgeous afternoon, boisterous children climbed the play equipment while their phone-wielding caretakers occasionally watched them. I heard a variety of languages, typical for any NYC playground, but the dominant sound was the combination of whoops and whines and giggles of the kids, and the thud of balls hitting backboards in the basketball courts.
What was special to me about the playground was the view it affords of the Manhattan skyline. Depending on where you’re standing, you’re gazing at midtown. Haze made it difficult to identify the buildings, but I could definitively see the ridiculous supertall towers on Billionaires’ Row just south of Central Park. And yes, supertall is a word, an architectural term actually, referring to buildings taller than 300 meters. In other words, a building that scrapes higher than the sky. Really??
To look at the Manhattan skyline you have to peer through and beyond the chain-link fences that separate the playground from adjacent Linden Hill United Methodist Cemetery and the Ahawith Chesed Cemetery (sometimes called Linden Hill Jewish). I didn’t see anyone looking through the fence (if they even noticed the vista). And if anyone were watching me place my iPhone in one of the tiny diamond-shaped holes in the fence to photograph the distant supertalls, they’d have had a good laugh, because about 250 feet away, you get a clear view of midtown, foregrounded by 21 acres of tombstones and no fence. And if you are really in the know, you will walk behind the high school, and from Grandview Avenue you’ll have an unobstructed view of that Oz-like skyline. Grandview, indeed.
Abashed, I left the playground and turned northwest onto Woodward Avenue. Almost immediately I noticed changes in the housing stock. Here the homes looked mid-20th-century and oddly suburban, in spite of their block-long attached structure. Some had driveways; some boasted a combination of brick and clapboard as though they were split-levels. With their parked cars and miniature grassy front yards, you could almost forget they were attached.
A few blocks later, the homes changed further, but now I saw upscale modern apartment buildings – evidence that we were approaching the Bushwick border. The 300 block of Woodward was especially striking. The dark glass and telltale Neutraface font (sometimes known as the “gentrification font” of house numbers) of 176 Woodward – christened “the Strand” by its developer – reveals who is renting there. (In fact, here are some of the amenities the Strand advertises: a sleek fitness-yoga studio, a beautiful rooftop garden, a game room complete with pool table, and a comfortable-looking shared work space conducive to networking.) The view from the rooftop must be spectacular, because down the hill – Woodward declines sharply around that block – and across the river is midtown Manhattan, and the view from that corner is dead-on dramatic.
But I had not walked this way for the New. I was looking for the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House, the oldest existing Dutch fieldstone house in New York City. I knew the address, but it was hard to believe I’d find it in the cacophony of warehouses and service stations along Flushing Avenue. But sure enough, there it was, sitting back from the street at 1820 Flushing Ave. Built in 1709, the home and its two acres of grounds are beautifully maintained by a nonprofit conservation organization, and appear, not surprisingly, on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s only open to the public on the weekends, so I couldn’t visit the inside. I found it vaguely amusing and not a little distressing to see this Colonial Era gem surrounded by graffiti, construction, traffic and warehouses. I’m not really sure anyone pays it any mind other than the caretakers and occasional preservationist visitors.
By the way, I love the name Onderdonk Avenue. I used to work at an organization with an office on Onderdonk. It was hard to pronounce the name with a straight face – I imagined an elephant blowing its trunk every time I said it. But I grew to love its goofy-sounding syllables. The name means under or below a small hill in Flemish and Dutch. Ridgewooders pronounce it as cavalierly as if they were saying “Grover Cleveland.”
Walking to the subway to go home, I began to notice more gentrified places: more cafés, more ethnic restaurants catering to people outside the ethnicity of the cuisine (including a Michelin-recognized Thai place), and the pièce de resistance, an outdoor beer garden featuring local craft brews. I marveled that Bushwick had bled into Ridgewood so forcefully…until I realized I was in Bushwick. The Vander Ende-Onderdonk (honk, honk) House is just a couple of blocks from the Queens/Brooklyn border. I walked around the beer garden for a few minutes, with its obligatory taqueria, dumpling vendor and selection of local craft brews. “I guess this is what they mean by Brooklyn,” I remarked Boomerishly to the fifty-something security guard. “I feel like a grandma.” He laughed and assured me he knew exactly how I felt.
August 26, 2024
I returned to Ridgewood a few months later, arriving by the Q58 bus from another part of Queens. Next to me on the bus was a teenage girl in a loosely-fitting headscarf, speaking to a friend on a videocall. “Do you like my shoes?” my companion grilled her friend, shifting her cellphone camera to her feet. “I’m about to get my nails done. Hey! This is like our first FaceTime call, isn’t it?” She then described a budding relationship with a boy. “He’s a year younger than me. He goes to Stuy.[5] He’s really smart. He doesn’t use the n-word. He’s introverted. He’s religious. He doesn’t want to scare me so he’s taking things very slowly. How did we meet? He saw a picture of me on [X’s] phone and thought I was cute! I really like him. His last girlfriend lied to him. She actually had five bodies.” (Five bodies, I thought? Could I have mis-eavesdropped? But she repeated it. I think she might have meant bed companions.) When I got off the bus, I winked at her and said “He sounds like a great catch. Good luck!” She thanked me indifferently.
I exited at Fresh Pond Road and Metropolitan Avenue, a neighborhood Google Maps calls Fresh Pond. That name, however, has largely disappeared except for the street itself. People in the area mostly consider themselves residents of Ridgewood, but also Maspeth, Glendale or Middle Village. (In the crowdsourced New York Times’ An Extremely Detailed Map of New York City Neighborhoods, Fresh Pond doesn’t even show up in locals’ neighborhood self-identification.) Riding and then walking along Fresh Pond Road, I was struck by the almost complete absence of ethnic businesses, perhaps less notable than I’ve come to think because of the specific immigrant neighborhoods I’ve been visiting. It was a street of anywhere amenities – plant stores, laundromats, hardware shops, Dunkin’ Donuts, etc.
I visited an old-time local business called Paradise Aquarium, at 66-16 Fresh Pond Road. When I entered, a young boy, nine or ten, was buying crickets to feed his lizard, which he called a dragon. I didn’t hear the type of lizard because he was bashful and soft-spoken, but he’s not alone in raising pet lizard-dragons; it’s a thing. His pet is named Dara, which seemed like an awfully sweet name for a spiny little beast. (At least I assumed she was little.) The boy had come alone to make his purchase, having walked there from his house nearby. This seemed quaint and defiant to me and made me love the neighborhood. (That may say more about my friends and me as parents than anything about Fresh Pond, I mean Ridgewood. Or about my own neighborhood.)
I chatted with the owner and his employee. The owner told me that Paradise has been around since 1948. He took it over from his parents, who bought it from the original owner. His parents raised him in the neighborhood; I inferred that he himself had moved away. Paradise has never had dogs or cats and he’s glad of it because the City’s regulations are onerous. I asked if Paradise carried reptiles, and when he said yes, in the back, I proclaimed that I would not go to the back, because I am phobic about snakes. He assured me that he’d seen worse phobias – in fact he once had a customer who started to cry and shake when she learned there were snakes on the premises! That made me feel brave. (I didn’t tell him that I didn’t understand how a place with snakes could be called Paradise, because I know my fears are not universal. But still.) I asked him how the neighborhood had changed over the years. He said that the changes are with the people, not the businesses. When he was growing up the area was German and Italian. Now, he says, it’s Polish and Spanish. Business is OK. I told him I’d read about his business in someone’s blog. He seemed indifferent, though he was not unfriendly.
I was mesmerized by a fish called a Jewel Pike Cichlid, which I thought was expensive at $69.99 for a four-inch fish. But then I noticed it was able to swim backward as well as forward and that changed my mind. Except that when I got home I googled whether fish could actually swim backward and I learned that almost all fish actually can, except for sharks. People buy Jewel Pike Chichlids because they can change color. They’re aggressive, but if you have the right fishtank companions, the color change (and I guess the swimming in reverse) might be cool to look at.
I’d had enough of Fresh Pond Road, with its nondescript necessities of daily living businesses. (I’ll call pets and pet supplies necessities, even though I have neither.) The side streets were beautiful, red and yellow brick with arched stone entryways. Across the street I saw a garage-like opening with someone working at – was it a desk? a studio table? a door turned on its side? As I drew closer, I saw it was a work table for a leatherworker. I stopped to chat. Drew Berry (howdy@drewberryboots.com) has been creating belts, wallets and other leather goods from his Ridgewood studio for two years now. He loves the location and the space seems to suit him, too. It was great to see a maker in action. I take it he is part of Ridgewood’s gentrification (it’s always the artists, isn’t it), a complicated phenomenon whose fortunes and failings I understand.
I continued on to Grover Cleveland Playground for another breathtaking view of the Manhattan skyline, super-psyched to see the supertalls again.
[1] Ridgewood’s proximity to Bushwick, and its expanding gentrification, have generated a number of portmanteau monikers for the neighborhood, including Bushburg, Ridgewick, Bushridge, and Quooklyn. Ridgewood and Bushwick actually used to be a single neighborhood, even sharing a ZIP code. Ridgewood-Bushwick or Bushwick-Ridgewood still appear in some institutional names, and some people still consider themselves residents of the hyphenated bi-borough neighborhood. This article provides an entertaining history of the dissolution of the marriage.
[2] Data from the NYC Department of City Planning’s Population FactFinder, based on 2020 census data.
[3] See, for example, https://a860-gpp.nyc.gov/concern/parent/t435gd86k/file_sets/t435gd87v
[4] https://www.npr.org/2013/01/04/168609672/amid-instability-in-egypt-coptic-christians-flee-to-u-s; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/neediest-cases/coptic-christians-faith-volunteerism.html
[5] Stuyvesant High School, one of the most competitive public high schools in New York City, perhaps in the entire country.