No one is really celebrating it, but on the eve of the nation’s 249th anniversary, I’d like to mention another anniversary: the redrawing of the Brooklyn-Queens borderline separating present-day neighborhoods of Bushwick and Ridgewood. The original boundary was set at what is today Flushing and Onderdonk Avenues by what was called Arbitration Rock. From FNY’s page on the boundary marker:
Natural elements, like trees, rivers and mountains, were and are still used to delineate political boundaries. In the case of Kings and Queens Counties, rocks and boulders left by the passing of a glacier 100 centuries in the past were used–and astoundingly, three such boulders are still in existence. In the back yard of the Onderdonk House is a large rock surrounded by a picket fence. It is the official position of the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society that this is the historic “Arbitration Rock” used to delineate the border, along the Brooklyn-Newtown Turnpike, of the borders of the towns of Bushwick and Newtown, or today’s Brooklyn-Queens line. In 1769 a large stone was used by surveyor Peter Marschalk to designate the boundary, which had been in dispute. The story goes that the rock had been left underground when Onderdonk Avenue was extended in 1930, and when the avenue was re-graded in 2000 the rock was exposed. It was moved to the backyard of the Onderdonk House the following year. The GRHS has yet to provide documentation in proof.
Other historians, such as Greater Astoria Historical Society’s Bob Singleton, aver that a large rock at Varick Avenue just north of Flushing Avenue was the true marker, and other entities claim a large rock at Morgan Avenue and Rock Street (since removed) was the marker.
For centuries the Brooklyn-Queens county border ran on a diagonal straight line cutting through Bushwick and Ridgewood, separating what were then the towns of Bushwick and Newtown. (Hagstrom map, 1922)
In 1925, after both neighborhoods were well built up and the line was cutting across properties, it was redrawn to zig and zag along a number of streets; the border today runs mainly along Cypress and Wyckoff Avenues. (Hagstrom map, 1949).
To honor the centennial of the modern, undefended Queens-Brooklyn border in Bushwick and Ridgewood, I thought I’d show a few scenes using the magic of Google Street View and saving me a trip.
Between Greenpoint and Long Island City, Blissville and Maspeth, the line runs down Newtown Creek. At the creek’s end at Metropolitan Avenue, it crosses the Long Island RR Bushwick freight-only tracks and runs down this one-block segment of Seneca Avenue for one block between Randolph Street and Flushing Avenue.
After zagging a block west on Flushing Avenue, the line then zigs south for several blocks on Cypress Avenue. I wasn’t frequenting the area before the 2000s, so I’m wondering if color coded street signs, white in Queens, and black in Brooklyn, were used along the border. If you lived in the area, Comments are open.
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