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While it seems at times that Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens are dominated by unimaginative street names… numbers, letters… in actuality vast swaths in all four boroughs are still dominated by streets named for real people.

I had always been under the impression that Stockholm Street in Bushwick and Ridgewood was so named in honor of a putative Scandinavian community that may have resided there. I was wrong, though; Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss’ handy Brooklyn By Name states that Stockholm Street was named for the Stockholm brothers, Andrew and Abraham, who provided land on which the Second Dutch Reformed Church, built in 1850 and still standing at Bushwick Avenue and Himrod Street, was built.

Bushwick and parts of Ridgewood long ago were nicknamed Old Germania Heights; dozens of breweries and German beer halls used to dot the landscape on the side streets. While there are still many Germans in NYC, former strongholds such as the East Village, Yorkville, and this area have evolved and changed over the decades.

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I have long been intrigued by one block of Stockholm Street in particular, the one on its northeastern end between Onderdonk and Woodward Avenues. We are officially in Queens, but the boundary is purely political.

You literally follow a yellow brick road on Stockholm Street between Onderdonk and  Woodward Avenues. It is paved with dark yellow or bright brown bricks. While other streets in Brooklyn and Queens boast worn or uneven Belgian blocks  and in very rare cases, red brick, this is the only street in either borough bearing exposed yellow brick. The street is ballasted by St. Aloysius Roman Catholic Church on the southwest at Onderdonk and Linden Hill Cemetery on the northeast.

 

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Stockholm Street’s main claim to fame is its 36 homes, on both sides of the street, built with yellow brick from the Bathazar Kreischer kilns of Staten Island. There are similar rows of yellow brick houses elsewhere in Ridgewood and in Long Island City, but only these have the added attraction of thin, Doric-columned porches.

When Stockholm Street was placed under the protection of the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2000 (meaning that no teardowns or drastic alterations can happen on the block) the LPC erected a sign on the block stating:

Thirty-five of the houses were constructed between 1907 and 1910, when German-Americans and immigrants from Germany were developing Ridgewood. The houses feature full-width wooden porches with columns, projecting bays, uninterrupted cornice lines and bricks produced by the Kreischer Brick Manufacturing Company of Staten Island. They were designed by the architectural firm of Louis Berger & Company and built by Joseph Weiss & Co.

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St. Aloysius Church, built by architect Francis Berlenbach between 1907-1917 at Onderdonk Avenue and Stockholm Street, is the largest NYC building constructed with Kreischer brick. At 165 feet in height its twin campaniles are exceeded or rivalled in the general area only by the Spanish Baroque St. Barbara’s R.C. Church at Central Avenue and Bleecker Street eight avenues to the south. The church is visible from all over southwest Queens and north Brooklyn.

Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of Forgotten NY and the author of Forgotten New York and, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens.

 


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