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.
Per the Ridgewood Times account, the parties to the dispute settled it in January 1769 by drawing the boundary off the rock’s position, roughly 300 feet northwest of the Onderdonk House, on ground now occupied by warehouses north of Flushing Avenue. For decades after, that line decided property fights between neighboring owners. Then Brooklyn and Queens were folded into New York City in 1898, and the rock stopped mattering.
The border moved again in 1925. By then the area was filling in with buildings, and the old line ran through the middle of city blocks, which meant it also ran through entire buildings and made a mess of real estate tax assessments and electoral district lines. The revised boundary ran from Newtown Creek across Metropolitan Avenue, down Onderdonk Avenue, along the Long Island Rail Road’s Bushwick branch and southeast on Seneca Avenue to Flushing Avenue, then down Flushing to Cypress Avenue and on through Menahan Street, St. Nicholas Avenue, Gates Avenue, Wyckoff Avenue, Eldert Street and Irving Avenue before threading between the cemeteries near Highland Park.
The paperwork change moved people. About 2,543 residents who had lived in Queens found themselves in Brooklyn, and 135 Brooklynites became Queens residents, the column reports.
In 1930, Onderdonk Avenue was rebuilt and the boulder was buried underneath it.
Late in the 20th century historians went looking for it. The hunt took seven years before the boulder was located and pulled out of Onderdonk Avenue, and unearthing it started a second argument over where it should go. Then-Queens Borough President Claire Shulman wanted it near Kew Gardens, the seat of the borough’s government. Historians and Brooklynites wanted it at the Onderdonk House, close to where it had always been.
The Onderdonk House side won. The parties agreed in 2001 to put Arbitration Rock on the grounds there, where it sits now.
