Ridgewood is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. It borders the neighborhoods of Maspeth, Middle Village and Glendale, as well as the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick. Historically, the neighborhood straddled the Queens-Brooklyn boundary. The neighborhood is part of Queens Community Board 5.

Over the years, Ridgewood has shifted in demographics from time to time. Historically a German and Italian neighborhood, it is now home to many families of Catholic backgrounds, mainly consisting of Latinos, Eastern Europeans, Middle Easterners, and Native-Born Americans. Harry Houdini is one of the former notable residents, and is buried nearby at the Machpelah Cemetery in neighboring Glendale.

Originally, Ridgewood was part of the Dutch settlement Boswijk (Bushwick) and was later incorporated into the village of Breuckelen (Brooklyn). A legacy of this past stands today; Onderdonk House, which was erected in 1709. The house is the oldest Dutch Colonial stone house in New York City. Also located at the Onderdonk House site is Arbitration Rock, which was a marker for the disputed boundary between Bushwick and Newtown and essentially Brooklyn and Queens.

The majority of the neighborhood covers a large hill, more than likely part of the glacial moraine that created Long Island, which starts at Metropolitan Avenue, rises steeply for about two blocks, then slopes down gently. A good example of just how steep the hill is can be found at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Parish. The front entrance of the Church, which is at street level on 60th Place, is almost level with the second floor of the Parish school right next door.

Major streets in Ridgewood include Seneca Avenue, Forest Avenue, Fresh Pond Road, Myrtle Avenue, and Metropolitan ("Metro") Avenue. All of these streets are narrow two-lane roads (with parking lanes), and the high volume on these streets can cause traffic tie-ups during rush hour. The intersection of Fresh Pond and Metropolitan is especially notorious for being a bottleneck. The main shopping areas are on Myrtle Avenue and Fresh Pond Road. Other, smaller shopping strips are located on Metropolitan Avenue, Forest Avenue, and Seneca Avenue.

Ridgewood is a densely settled neighborhood, with housing stock ranging from six-family buildings near the Brooklyn border to two-family and single-family row houses deeper into Queens. Ridgewood is visually distinguished from Bushwick by the large amount of exposed brick construction; in Brooklyn, vinyl siding is more common. Like neighboring Bushwick, nearly all of the buildings in Ridgewood are classified as combustible.

Most of Ridgewood was developed block-by-block around the turn of the 20th century. The neighborhood has been largely untouched by construction since then, leaving many centrally planned blocks of houses and tenements still in the same state as their construction. These blocks include the Matthews Flats (six-family cold water tenements), Ring-Gibson Houses (two- and four-family houses with stores), and Stier Houses (curved two-family rowhouses). Many of these houses are well-kept and retain much of their early 20th century appeal.

Thirteen national historic districts were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983: 68th Avenue-64th Place Historic District; 75th Avenue-61st Street Historic District; Central Avenue Historic District; Central Ridgewood Historic District; Cooper Avenue Row Historic District; Cornelia-Putnam Historic District; Cypress Avenue East Historic District; Cypress Avenue West Historic District; Fresh Pond-Traffic Historic District; Madison-Putnam-60th Place Historic District; Seneca Avenue East Historic District; Stockholm-DeKalb-Hart Historic District; and Summerfield Street Row Historic District.

The M runs through the heart of Ridgewood, and its connection to the L at Myrtle-Wyckoff Avenues at the south end of Ridgewood is a transportation hub, with a 60 million dollar renovation completed in 2007. At the end of the M train is the Fresh Pond Yard, a storage yard for the M train.

The Ridgewood Terminal at that station serves the B13, B26, B52, B54, Q55, and Q58 bus lines. The B20, B38, Q39 and Q54 bus lines also serve Ridgewood. In addition, the neighborhood is home to the large Fresh Pond Bus Depot, which services many of the buses that run throughout Brooklyn and Queens.

The Ridgewood Times, established in 1908, and now known as the Times Newsweekly, serves as the community newspaper, and has the largest classifieds section of Queens County community newspapers.

Ridgewood was formerly the site of one of the nation's oldest cinematic theaters, the Ridgewood Theatre. The 1,950 seat William Fox moviehouse was open from 1916 to 2008.Although landmarked, this site will now become an Associated supermarket.

Ridgewood has also served as location shoots for numerous major motion pictures, including The French Connection, A Stranger Among Us, The Wanderers, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Jerky Boys: The Movie, Beat Street and Cop Out. In addition to these movies, scenes for The Sopranos were filmed on Fresh Pond Road in Ridgewood on March 9, 2006, when a hookah bar next to the neighborhood bar, Glenlo's Tavern was detonated.

Today, Ridgewood’s land area lies within Queens County. However, its political boundary with Brooklyn causes confusion and debate about where the western boundary of Ridgewood truly lies and whether part of Ridgewood is considered to be actually part of Brooklyn. Ridgewood and its Brooklyn neighbor community, Bushwick, have a grid plan street layout. Because the boundary between Brooklyn and Queens that was historically set in 1769 at the Arbitration Rock lay along a diagonal with this grid plan, the geographic boundary was adapted to the street layout, resulting in a zig-zag pattern. Buildings fronting on streets that “begin” in Brooklyn (i.e., located west of Forest Avenue), and the cross-streets that bisect them, follow a house-numbering system commencing within Brooklyn (Myrtle and Metropolitan Avenues are exceptions to this system). Put more simply, as the numbering of residential addresses proceeds traveling from Kings County into Queens County, the political border is crossed without any change in the address-numbering system.[citation needed]

Until the late 1970s, Ridgewood and neighboring Glendale (Queens) were entirely served by the Brooklyn post office in Bushwick. Before ZIP CODES were introduced, letters would be addressed to "Ridgewood, 27 New York" or "Brooklyn, 27 New York" After ZIP CODES were instituted either "Ridgewood NY 11227" or "Brooklyn NY 11227." was used. Following events surrounding the New York City blackout of 1977 which marred the public perception of the Bushwick community, the communities of Ridgewood and Glendale expressed a desire to disassociate themselves from Bushwick. In 1979, the two areas were granted a Queens zip code, 11385, while Bushwick was designated a separate Brooklyn zip code of 11237.

P.S. 305 is a public school for Pre-K to 3rd grade. P.S. 68, P.S. 71, P.S. 239, P.S. 81 and P.S. 88 are public schools that serve Pre-K to 5th grade. There are also private elementary schools in Ridgewood such as; St. Matthias, St. Aloysius, Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, and St. Brigid.

I.S. 77 and I.S. 93 are public middle schools in Ridgewood.

The Grover Cleveland High School is the only high school in Ridgewood, and is the zoned public high school to most of Ridgewood. Over the last couple of years there has been serious debate as to whether this high school as well as a number of other schools should be closed down due to low scores and gang violence in and surrounding the school. However, the school still remains as the only public high school in Ridgewood.

From 1886 to 1889, Ridgewood Park was home to the Brooklyn Bridegrooms (later the Brooklyn Dodgers and now the Los Angeles Dodgers) for their Sunday games.

Notable current and former residents of Ridgewood include:

All of Bushwick's representatives are Democrats.

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