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An Ice Age boulder settled the Bushwick-Newtown border in 1769. The city paved over it in 1930, and it took historians seven years to dig it back up

An Ice Age boulder known as Arbitration Rock settled the colonial border between Bushwick and Newtown in 1769, was paved over in 1930, and recovered by historians in 2001 for display at the Onderdonk House in Ridgewood.

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The line between Brooklyn and Queens is not a natural thing. North of Ridgewood it follows Newtown Creek and south of it Jamaica Bay, but the landlocked stretch in between has been redrawn street by street for generations. A boulder now sitting in the back yard of the Onderdonk House on Onderdonk Avenue once marked that boundary.

That boulder is Arbitration Rock, an Ice Age stone that helped end decades of colonial border fights between the town of Bushwick and the town of Newtown, which is what Ridgewood was originally called, according to a column by The Old Timer published by QNS in June and reprinted from the Aug. 27, 2015 issue of the Ridgewood Times.

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