Cypress Avenue East Historic District

Cypress Avenue East is a 26-acre neighborhood in Ridgewood, Queens, made up of 247 structures built between 1900 and 1914. Most are three-story brick tenements with two apartments on each floor. The most distinctive feature is the alternating light and dark speckled brick on adjoining facades, laid up to imitate rusticated stone and producing horizontal bands of shadow along each row. The district matters because it preserves a cohesive group of tenements modeled on the "Mathews Flats" first built in Ridgewood by G.X. Mathews. Builders August Bauer and Paul Stier erected most of them in 1912-14 from plans by Louis Berger, using wide lots, interior airshafts, large windows in every room and separate sanitary facilities in each apartment. Earlier rows from 1904 and 1908 on Seneca Avenue, also designed by Berger's firm, use round brick arches that may have inspired the later Mathews Flats. The buildings remain largely intact, with only minor alterations such as new doors, awnings and storefronts.