Cypress Avenue West Historic District

Cypress Avenue West is a district of 440 buildings along the Queens-Brooklyn border in Ridgewood, covering about 36.5 acres across parts of 16 blocks. It consists mainly of two- and three-story brick row houses and three-story tenements, along with a school, a church and a row of commercial buildings. Most were built between 1888 and 1906, many to designs by Louis Berger and Co. and by developers who coordinated setbacks, scale and materials. Rows alternate light and dark brick facades, accented with sandstone, brownstone or terra-cotta trim and different arrangements of arched lintels. The district also records a local building story: because the old borough line ran diagonally through several blocks, builders extended brick construction into Queens rather than follow two sets of codes. G.X. Mathews experimented here with T-shaped tenement plans before adopting H-shaped plans elsewhere. Together the buildings produced over 2,000 apartments and illustrate low-scale housing built by German immigrants around the turn of the twentieth century.