A view of the Onderdonk house from the orchard. The house was built in 1709 but was restored after a 1976 fire. — Photos by Diego Cupolo

The decades have a way of piling up on one another in our ever-changing neighborhood. We have been known to indulge in nostalgia for the lost landmarks of 2005, never mind the twentieth century. With so much reinvention it’s hard to believe that there remains any exposed strata from the deepest history of old Boswijck, when the newcomers spoke Dutch and worked the open land with Calvinist determination. But yes, two acres of the early Bushwick-Newtown frontier does survive between the 99¢ warehouses of Flushing Avenue, and with it New York City’s oldest Dutch stone house, the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House.

The incongruous farmhouse dates back to 1709, though Paulus Vander Ende built it on the foundations of an even earlier mid-seventeenth century home standing on 108 acres of land granted by Director General Stuyvesant himself. The location was a choice one, the sparkling waters of Newtown Creek providing a direct channel to the produce markets of New Amsterdam and subsequently New York.

At the same time it was still a remote site, threatened by violence from Indians (which had the farmers recalled to their parish church in Bushwick town for protection) and the English of Newtown, who fought a miniature border war that finally saw the Kings and Queens county line drawn through the farm, its authority marked in 1769 by the Arbitration Rock which now resides behind the house.

	Members of the Ridgewood Historical Society reenact life from the 1600s. Click to enlarge.

In 1821 the farm passed into the hands of the Onderdonk family, well connected Knickerbockers who built their own additions and did their best to keep the house fashionable through the nineteenth century. The road to Flushing was becoming a tree-lined haven of respectable households, including that of Adrian Onderdonk’s wife Anna Wyckoff, just four future avenues away. In this stately company, in fact, the old farmhouse was something of an ugly duckling, but the twentieth century would grant it the last laugh.

As the neighborhood that would be Ridgewood began to appear, the farm lost acres to new lots of housing from Catalpa Avenue up. With the farm reduced to two acres, the farmhouse too was sold in 1908. Thereafter the house and its remaining patch went through an unlikely series of uses, from a scrap glass depository used by Louis Comfort Tiffany‘s Corona workshop (if you ever need to restore a lamp, the gardeners still dig up buckets of Tiffany glass) to a geranium nursery supplying the cemetery belt, to a machine shop supplying the Apollo space program. In 1976, like so much else in the vicinity, it burned. 

The year before the fire, local residents had formed the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society to prevent the house’s demolition. The Society obtained the deed and raised funds to restore the building, re-opening it as a museum in 1982.

When we visited on a sunny Saturday, a birthday party was coming together in the garden (which is made available for events) and Society members were spring cleaning around the house. Artistic director – and former opera singer with the Met – Richie Asbell was giving a fresh coat of paint to the front sign accompanied by a bit of Mozart, but took a long break to show us around the house. The two main rooms are divided into colonial and Victorian, with much of the latter room furnished from Asbell’s collecting efforts. Another room holds temporary exhibitions, currently of one of Asbell’s particular fascinations, ornate nineteenth-century lighting. There’s more that isn’t open to the public, including the cellar, where the family might have spent much of their winters. 

The realm of tulips and fieldstone walls feels like a Diedrich Knickerbocker travel brochure next to the Flushing Avenue we know, but you’ll just have to take our word for it that it exists and is well worth dropping in for a chat. It may not sound especially relevant to our urban present, but with local food back in vogue and the gardening season rolling in, it can’t hurt to get to know those who first broke this soil.

The Onderdonk House is open Saturdays, 1-5pm, unless noted. Suggested donation is $3.00.