Marvelous Myrtle Avenue, Ridgewood

Myrtle Avenue, which runs from Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn all the way east to Jamaica Avenue in Richmond Hill, is one of those lengthy streets that belongs as much to Queens as it does to Brooklyn, much like Metropolitan Avenue a couple of miles to its north. It was originally built as a plank road and was added to in stages before reaching its final length in the mid-1850s. It was given its name because of the myrtle trees that proliferated at its western end when it first appeared on maps.

From the late 1880s until 1969, most of Myrtle Avenue’s length was shadowed by an elevated train, the last such in NYC to use wood rolling stock. All of the Myrt’s route was overground, and wood cars were prohibited underground — if they caught on fire in the tunnels, the fire would be much harder to put out. After 1969, only a stretch from Brooklyn’s Broadway along Myrtle Avenue and Palmetto Streets and ending at Metropolitan still remained in service, as it does today. At Wyckoff Avenue and Palmetto Myrtle again edges into the light, and serves as the main east-west shopping, dining and entertainment mecca of Ridgewood.

No fewer than five World War I monuments can be found along Myrtle Avenue’s length, scattered in Bushwick, Ridgewood, Glendale and Richmond Hill. Arguably the standout among them is the Ridgewood Tholos, or Ridgewood Remembrance, at Cypress and Myrtle. In his fine book Out of Fire and Valor, a treatise on NYC’s war memorials, Cal Snyder writes:

The finest war memorial in Queens, and one of two or three in the city of surpassing integrity and beauty… the drum-like temple is faced with large, curving bronze panels that work together as a narrative, depicting the three theatres of war, the men who fought there, and the angels who guided and walked beside them. The bronze workmanship is superb, lending the figures drama, unique personalities, and scenes that are filled with interest. Alternating with the panels are granite fascias that list the names of dead.

…[T]his memorial not only has superb bronze workmanship but exalted speech that gives it a genuine greatness, casting the figures into a light of acute longing, love and sacrifice. The words speak from the bands of bronze beneath the figures, and are also graven into a continuous frieze around the base of the panels: ‘They upheld America’s cause, and the hallowed memory abides with us.’ And: ‘I am summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear without veneration and love.’ And, in the granite it is written: ‘ They earned eternity in a brief moment of time.’

The architects were Helmle and Corbett, the sculptor Anton Schaaf. The memorial was dedicated on Memorial Day, 1923.

On the SW corner you will find the former Ridgewood National Bank, now a Rite Aid Drugstore. Just as banks buy each other up, so do drug stores. Rite Aid recently consumed Eckards, which had ingested Genovese. According to the Myrtle Avenue Business Improvement District, this bank was organized by a group including local developer Paul Stier and architect Louis Berger (Stier developed much of surrounding Ridgewood, and Berger built the handsome attached porched homes on the landmarked Stockholm Street). This bank building was constructed for $36,000 and opened in 1910.