Officially

Matt Levy

With all the never-ending hoopla about neighborhood name recognition and boundary disputes (holla! to all the people who live in Morgantown / Bushburg!) in our beloved Brooklyn and other boroughs, its refreshing and reassuring to know that this sort of territoriality about who-lives-where has been with us for well over 200 years. As the highly similar Dutch colonial townships of Boswijck and Ridgewood (both were heavy forested areas sharing Newtown Creek) were establishing and separating their boundaries, the western edge of Boswijck / eastern edge of Ridgewood found itself under dispute. And what a dispute it was - the borderline was under argument from 1660 to 1769, during which tensions ran high among the farming communities on either side of the line.

Keep in mind this was well before either village got incorporated into their respective overarching territories of the City of Brooklyn (absorbing Bushwick and Williamsburg in 1854) and Queens Village (along with the rest of the Queens and the outer boroughs in the Great Consolidation of 1898). So keeping their individuality and identity was crucial, as it directly related to the villages' political and economic power in farming goods sold to other nearby villages. Some accounts of the day, in the mid 18 th century spoke of Bushwick farmers and Ridgewood traders coming to blows along the dividing line, today's Forest Avenue at Onderdonk Avenue. Finally in 1769 a rock the size of a small car, called Arbitration Rock, was placed in the backyard of the Onderdonk house at 1820 Flushing Avenue. The Onderdonk house, built in 1731, is the last Dutch Colonial style farmhouse (and the only farmhouse) in the area and currently home to the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society.

Regardless, the establishment of this final dividing line between Bushwick and Ridgewood happened to be anything but absolute. Seeing as how both modern-day communities exist on the same grid plan, and mailing addresses are tantamount to the street names and numbers, some residents of southwestern Ridgewood got lumped in with the northeastern Bushwick zip codes. Up until 1979, upon addressing a letter to your Auntie M at the Onderdonk farmhouse, you would've addressed as such:

Auntie M,
1820 Onderdonk Avenue,
Ridgewood, *Brooklyn* NY, 11227

although by every other indication (political office, firehouses, police precincts, school districts) Auntie M lived in Queens. It wasn't until the blackout of 1977 and the resulting looting and burning of Bushwick that the residents of Ridgewood, fed up with their disparate inclusion into the devolving, destroyed neighborhood to the south, petitioned and successfully received their own separate zip code, finally distancing themselves from Brooklyn once and for all.