Seneca Avenue East Historic District

Seneca Avenue East in Ridgewood, Queens, is lined with 120 brick buildings put up between 1905 and 1915. Most are two-story row houses with one apartment per floor or three-story tenements with two apartments per floor, spread over about 8.5 acres and parts of nine blocks. Speckled brick in yellow, amber, burnt orange, brown and cream gives the rows variety, while brownstone stoops, cast-stone lintels and door surrounds, and continuous pressed metal cornices tie the streetscape together. Builders worked in a coordinated way, keeping setbacks, scale and materials consistent and favoring Romanesque and Renaissance Revival ornament. The district was listed as an intact example of working-class housing from Ridgewood's early twentieth-century growth, and it reflects on a small scale the development of the area's larger districts. Parts of it occupy the former Ridgewood Park and Colesseum site, sold to developers in 1910. Two rows of 1911 model tenements and the nearby Gothic Revival Public School 77 are also associated with it.