Woodbine-Palmetto-Gates Historic District

This 8-acre district in Ridgewood, Queens, covers about three and a half city blocks and contains 91 buildings put up between 1908 and 1911. Most are three-story brick tenements with two apartments per floor, built by the G.X. Mathews Co. to designs by Louis Allmendinger. The rows differ by street: Palmetto Street's buildings use yellow brick with burnt orange trim and varied window lintels, Woodbine Street's use flat cast-stone lintels, and Gates Avenue's use pale amber brick with brown rock-faced bands. A row at 706 to 720 Forest Avenue has unusually angled bays above storefronts. The district is notable as an intact collection of "Mathews Flats," an early model tenement type whose floor plans and sanitary facilities became standards for later construction. It includes the earliest fully developed examples of the type in the surrounding resource area. Alterations have been modest, mainly new stoops, doors, awnings and storefronts, and the boundaries exclude nearby frame and commercial buildings that do not match the character.