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Old world Bavarian charm was abundant in Gottscheer Hall, a community hub in Ridgewood, Queens, that celebrated its 90th anniversary in early October. Children wore lederhosen and dirndls. A trio played trumpets and accordions. German septuagenarians in suspenders and polka dots swayed beneath tiered chandeliers.
“Years ago, things didn’t look so rosy,” said an older woman at the dais, her voice quavering as she described a period of diminished patronage.
Gottscheer’s survival can be credited to the younger crowd in the bar up front, where artsy types in their 20s and 30s, wearing hoodies and black-frame glasses, huddled over mugs of Spaten.
“When I first moved there, I never saw people that were my age,” said Caitlin White, 26, an editor at MTV News who moved to Ridgewood last year from Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Since then, she has noticed a demographic shift. “Creative people love to be the ones that explore new territory,” she said.
This trapezoidal tract, just northeast of Bushwick, is being cited by the city’s bohemian class as the latest up-and-coming neighborhood.
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The trajectory is familiar, and the players have slid into familiar position: broke millennials, underemployed artists, craven property speculators, fearful natives and first-time homeowners priced out of other markets.
Cafes with vegan muffins, yoga studios and destination pizzerias have (naturally) sprouted. Bars with names like Milo’s Yard and Bierleichen are slated to open. Guitar cases, tote bags and shearling coats are increasingly frequent accessories on pedestrians.
Ridgewood is in the chrysalis stage of an outer-borough transformation that shrieks “Brooklyn.” Except it’s not in that overhyped borough.
“Most people were like, ‘Queens? You’ve got to be kidding,’ ” said Brian Taylor, who is opening Onderdonk & Sons, a beer and burger joint on Onderdonk Avenue this month. He is an owner of the Pencil Factory, a popular bar that opened 14 years ago in Greenpoint, and now feels priced out of that neighborhood. “People are saying ‘Ridgewood, that’s the hottest place ever.’ ”
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In a nod to Ridgewood’s burgeoning trendiness, some are even calling it “Quooklyn,” after a dining reporter for The New York Times coined the term in a June review of Houdini Pizza Laboratory. Though the term was met with derision and smirks (Gothamist.com joked that it was “ridiculous, because everyone knows it’s already Ridgewick”), it exemplified how this slab of Queens has been infused with Kings County DNA.
At first glance, Ridgewood appears an unlikely candidate for the next hot neighborhood.
Populated in the early 1900s by Germans employed at breweries and knitting mills, it later became a stronghold for Italians, Puerto Ricans, Poles and other Eastern European immigrants. Streets are quiet and leafy, lined by yellow brick homes with bay windows and porches spiked with American flags. And it’s distant: The local Myrtle-Wyckoff subway station is nine stops from Manhattan on the L train and seven stops along on the M line.
But as real estate prices in Brooklyn rose, isolation became less of a deterrent for newcomers like Rahill Jamalifard, 29, a musician in the band Habibi, who moved to Ridgewood 10 months ago from Bushwick for cheaper rents. “I assumed it was just going to be an extension of Bushwick,” she said. “It was completely different.” Her tranquil block has a Coptic church and an Albanian bar. “At night the silence is so great,” she said.
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grand ave.
Queens
Knockdown Center
Flushing ave.
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Forest ave.
fairview ave.
Gottscheer Hall
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Onderdonk & Sons
Brooklyn
Julia’s Bar
Norma’s
Trans Peco
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Houdini Kitchen
Laboratory
Still, comparisons to Bushwick are unavoidable along the jigsaw border of Wyckoff Avenue, a Latino enclave of low-rise storefront churches and barbershops. As luxury condos with rooftop patios and communal work spaces metastasized throughout Bushwick, creative types crossed the border into Queens.
The main motivator is real estate. Danny Millan, a real estate agent with MNS, a brokerage firm, said rents in Ridgewood are about 20 percent cheaper a square foot than in Bushwick. He said a 500-square-foot one-bedroom apartment in Ridgewood can go for $1,600, versus $2,100 in Bushwick. “That gap will close in the next few years as the border blurs,” he said.
Housing developments are underway along the industrial corridor of Wyckoff Avenue alongside sidewalk DVD salesmen and fruit stands. In late October, paperwork was filed to demolish three commercial buildings near the train station. Zoning allows for the construction of a 13-story, 120-unit residential tower.
Some residents attribute the neighborhood’s rising popularity to extended subway service. Previously, weekend M train passengers in Ridgewood headed to Manhattan were forced to transfer to either L or J trains in Brooklyn. Since June, those riders have been able to ride the M train all the way to the Essex Street stop on the Lower East Side.
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It is also easier to attract Manhattanites who are reluctant to pay $30 in cab fare. In September, Justin Scott, 27, a D.J. for ASAP Mob, was surprised to discover a late-night rave at a warehouse several blocks from the “college kid trap house” on Decatur Street where he has lived for seven years. “It was a hipster crowd in the middle of Ridgewood,” he said of a party attended by Scout Willis, a daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. “They were playing Brazilian House and everybody was turnt up. It was so weird.”
Predictably, the arrival of youthful transplants has engendered a backlash. The Twitter account Gentrifying Ridgewood! pokes fun at the fast-changing neighborhood with tweets like, “I’m obliviously speaking Spanish to an Egyptian deli owner!” and “Working to secure a Whole Foods in Ridgewood, Queens by 2016.”
But for now, part of Ridgewood’s appeal is still its distance from the swarms of condo-dwellers and tourists who overran Williamsburg and Greenpoint.
Trans-Pecos, a low-frills music spot on Wyckoff Street, opened a year ago across the street from an auto yard. Run by Todd Patrick and Sam Hillmer, veterans of Brooklyn’s D.I.Y. scene, it has hosted musical acts like Mykki Blanco and Dev Hynes, and offers community programming several times a week. Last summer, when Spank Rock performed in front of a small crowd of 20-somethings with stonewashed jeans and cans of Genesee beer, it was easy to draw parallels to the nascent North Brooklyn scene of the Aughts.
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Intersection | Ridgewood Revival
“Ridgewood is one of these really wonderful neighborhoods in New York that is really welcoming and inviting to some of the newer people,” said Todd Broockerd, who has seen the neighborhood evolve.
Video by Oresti Tsonopoulos and Natalia V. Osipova on Publish Date August 13, 2014.“There are a lot of people from Manhattan for whom the thrill of the $20 mixologied cocktail has long past,” said Mr. Hillmer, who hopes Ridgewood’s remote location curtails a Williamsburg-like fate of unchecked gentrification. “They remember the legit show and they want that back.”
Nearby is the Knockdown Center, a 50,000-square-foot arts center on three acres along the Maspeth border. It has an art gallery and hosts weddings, lectures and concerts (M.I.A. played there last spring). Two summers ago, Knockdown hosted raucous Tiki Disco parties run by Roberta’s, the pioneering pizzeria in Bushwick. After the waves of boozy revelers in cutoffs and ’90s basketball jerseys subsided, longtime residents wailed about the dangers of the newcomers. An article in Juniper Berry Magazine, a local publication, complained of “sexual acts out in the open” and said that the arts center was a harbinger of overdevelopment.
Still, Roberta’s build-it-and-they-will-come model is being replicated at Houdini, a pizzeria on Decatur Street. Opened last year in an old brewery, it’s outfitted with familiar rusticity like barn lamps and machine parts.
On a recent Saturday night, young people and families ate pizzas freighted with pancetta and other toppings. Massimiliano Bartoli, the owner, wore camouflage and had a Batali-esque ponytail. He called Ridgewood a “ticking bomb” for development, and pointed out nearby buildings undergoing conversion into artist studios. “There is a brewing situation,” he said.
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At the moment, Ridgewood’s most Instagrammed restaurant may be Bunker, a 27-seat Vietnamese joint on a grubby stretch of Metropolitan Avenue. On one weekend evening, fleets of young customers lined up for an hour to dine in a spot with tin cans full of chopsticks and a communal water cooler. Outside, one group debated which subway returned to civilization (the Jefferson Street stop on the L line is nine blocks away).
Bunker opened in early 2013 to feed local scrapyard and M.T.A. workers, but the menu of flounder over vermicelli and banh mi sandwiches earned raves from blogs and restaurant critics. Last December, Guy Fieri visited on a Queens-themed episode of “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”
“It got so out of hand,” said Roy Zapanta, 40, one of three skaters from Elmhurst, Queens, who started the restaurant. “I hung menus, Chinese-style. Everything else is media blast.”
Even with all the chatter about Ridgewood, some residents believe the narrative is twisted. “Real estate people are excited because it’s the next neighborhood,” said Crystal River Williams, a co-founder of Norma’s, a cafe on Catalpa Avenue that serves baked goods and bread pudding to freelancers on MacBooks, chess-playing Europeans and customers from the Muslim barber next door. “But they’re not honing in on what makes it special.”
Rather, she compared Ridgewood to Park Slope, a sleepy Brooklyn neighborhood of families and baby strollers. “It’s not cool,” she said, “as much as people want it to be.”