The year the builders switched to brick
Ridgewood's housing turns on one date. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's report on the Ridgewood North Historic District records that developers "built wood-frame houses until 1905, when building codes took effect requiring masonry construction." The same report says more than 5,000 structures were built in Ridgewood from the turn of the century to World War I. So the typical house on these blocks is a brick rowhouse or small multi-family a little over a hundred years old, built largely by a handful of developers, two of whom are named below. Rows that one builder put up together tend to share their details, which helps a buyer: what is true of one 1910 brick row is a fair first guess about the one beside it.
Four historic districts, and why they matter at closing
- Central Ridgewood, designated in December 2014, covers 990 buildings. The commission's announcement says most were constructed between 1906 and the First World War by German-Americans and German immigrants, and credits the builder Paul Stier, whom it calls Ridgewood's most prolific, with over 2,000 houses in the area, including about half of those in the district.
- Ridgewood North, designated September 15, 2009, is 96 buildings, mostly three-story brick tenements built between 1908 and 1914, mainly by the G.X. Mathews Company. They are the "Mathews Model Flats", a "new law" tenement design.
- Ridgewood South (2010) and Stockholm Street (2000) complete the set, according to the Historic Districts Council's Queens list.
Inside a historic district, exterior work generally needs a permit from the commission. That includes replacement windows, a new front door, facade repointing and cornice repair. For a buyer, this has two effects. Repairs to the street face of the building can cost more and take longer than the same work elsewhere. And work that a previous owner did without approval can surface as a violation. Whether an address falls inside a district should be confirmed on the commission's map.
Reading a 1910 brick row
The items below describe this building type in general. They are not observations from particular Ridgewood addresses.
- Facade brick and lintels. CityLand's account of the Ridgewood North designation describes yellow and orange Kreischer-brick facades with stone details. Hard-fired face brick lasts, but the mortar, the stone or steel lintels over windows and the joint where the front wall meets the party walls all move with age. Stair-step cracks, bowed areas and patched lintels are what to look for.
- Pressed-metal cornices. The same account mentions pressed-metal cornices and ironwork at the stoops. A sheet-metal cornice is hollow and hung from the wall; rusted seams and failed anchors are a safety matter as well as a cosmetic one.
- Flat roofs and parapets. Rows of this kind have low-slope roofs draining to the rear. Ponding, layers of old roofing, and open joints in the parapet coping are typical of the type, and leaks from them show up first at top-floor ceilings along the front and rear walls.
- Party walls. Shared walls are good fire separation until someone cuts into them. Chimney flues inside party walls serve both houses in some rows, which matters when a heating appliance is changed.
- Shared drains and stacked units. In a six-family or three-family building, kitchens and baths stack over each other on cast-iron lines now past a century old. Every unit that can be entered is run, and the stack is examined in the cellar.
- Long, narrow floor plans. Where apartments run front to back on a narrow lot, they raise light, ventilation and egress questions when rooms are re-partitioned into extra bedrooms.
Small multi-family buildings, in census terms
Census geography lumps Ridgewood with Glendale, Maspeth and Middle Village as Community District 5. Across that district the 2024 one-year American Community Survey estimates about 17 percent of homes in three- and four-unit buildings and nearly 15 percent in buildings of five to nine units, with about half of all homes in structures from before 1940. The landmark reports describe exactly this kind of building: the three-story "Mathews Model Flats." These are survey estimates and carry wide margins.
Two rules follow from unit count. A building with three or more apartments is a multiple dwelling under state law, with its own requirements for egress and fire separation. And Local Law 152 gas-piping inspections apply: the Department of Buildings places District 5 in the group that was due in 2025 and comes due again in 2029. One- and two-family homes are exempt. If you are buying a three-family or larger, ask for the filed certification.
Unpermitted alterations and sewers: what the community board has asked for
In its budget priorities for fiscal year 2026, as reported by QNS, Community Board 5 asked for more buildings inspectors and plan examiners to deal with unauthorized construction and illegal alterations, and ranked sewer reconstruction in flood-prone areas among its top capital requests. Neither is a statement about a specific block. They are reasons to compare the certificate of occupancy with the actual layout, and to check the address on the city's stormwater flood map before relying on a cellar for anything but storage.
Booking, and the M train
The M train stops at Seneca Av, Forest Av and Fresh Pond Rd, and meets the L train at Myrtle–Wyckoff Avs on the Brooklyn–Queens border, per the state's MTA station dataset.
Rumi Home Inspections is based in East New York, Brooklyn and covers Ridgewood from there. Walkthroughs are in English or Bangla and the report is sent the same day. For a three-family or a Mathews flat building, start with the multi-family inspection page; then send us the address.