The building is almost a hundred years old – a tower of stone called Gottscheer Hall that, in October, will celebrate its centenary in the neighborhood. The occasion will mark a feat of continued persistence in a neighborhood known and admired for its stubborn hold on tradition, which has become an immense part of Ridgewood’s appeal.

The hall’s quiet and unfussy mid-block bar, where gentle sunlight crawls into a wood-paneled cavern, feels largely unchanged for most of that last century.  On an ordinary weekend afternoon last month, the room was filled with a hundred or so of its longtime regulars, who had pilgrimaged there in sharp suits evocative of the post-war era, to mark another anniversary. It’s the 88th year, and counting, for one of the seven or eight local ‘gottschee’-themed clubs that call the building home. Gottschee is the old name of a once-isolated town in central Europe that had sprung up some six hundred years ago, which is now primarily a memory shared by descendants who gather here, and elsewhere. “They moved to industrial cities, settling in Cleveland, Ohio, and Ridgewood, Queens,” writes Lynette Chiu in an exhaustive story on the group’s history in the neighborhood. 

“It’s definitely gotten smaller,” Robert Hoefferle told me, gesturing at the old-timers and their extended family members gathered for the event. Hoefferle is a local lawyer who also runs one of the clubs, called the Gottscheer Vereinigung, a kind of pension group that formed during the Great Depressions and ,Hoefferle, admits, is now down to about 20 or so aging gottscheers. He moves at a melancholy pace around the room.hands jerk around as he talks, distracted.