14 APRIL 16, 2020 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
Middle Village grew around this old town tavern
BY THE OLD TIMER
OUR NEIGHBORHOOD: THE WAY IT WAS
EDITORIAL@RIDGEWOODTIMES.COM
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Walk down Metropolitan Avenue
in Middle Village these
days and you won’t find
very many watering holes. But in the
community’s early days, Middle Village
was a popular stopover for Long
Island farmers on their way to the
markets of Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Middle Village gained its name as
the midway point of the Williamsburgh
Jamaica Turnpike (present-day
Metropolitan Avenue), which was
opened in 1816. Anybody can travel
down Metropolitan Avenue without
paying a dime (unless you want to
park a car at a metered spot), but the
road itself was conceived by brothers
Stephen and Samuel Masters as a
private toll road.
The turnpike ran from the intersections
of Van Wyck Street (today
the Van Wyck Expressway) and the
Brooklyn-Jamaica Turnpike (presentday
Jamaica Avenue) in Jamaica, and
the western end of the Newtown Creek
near present-day Morgan Avenue.
The Masters brothers built the road
for farmers to use as a shortcut for
their horse-drawn wagons hauling
fruit and produce to the Catherine
Street Market in Manhattan. Aft er arriving
at the Williamsburg end of the
turnpike, they would continue their
travel to the Grand Street ferry landing
on the East River, then boarded a
ferry boat to Lower Manhattan.
Middle Village came into being
around 1840, and was named because
of its geographic locale on the turnpike.
Hotels and restaurants popped
up in Middle Village, off ering rest for
farmers either heading to the market
or on their way back home.
In 1845, Samuel R. Way — a descendant
of James Way, one of the fi rst
settlers in the Middle Village area —
built an imposing, three-story brick
hotel on the north side of the Jamaica-
Williamsburgh Turnpike just to the
west of what is today 78th Street. The
sturdy building had heavy, wooden
spruce beams with a foundation over
a foot thick with a large basement for
storage.
The ground fl oor contained Way’s
bar, known as The Brick Tavern, and
the second and third fl oors contained
22 lodging rooms. A separate building
in the rear of the property featured a
stable with a well.
The Way hotel opened long before
the advent of indoor plumbing. Each
room, lit with whale oil lamps, was
furnished with a chamber pot. The
second and third floors did have
shared bathing rooms with a tub; it’s
believed to be one of the fi rst hotels on
Long Island to have such a convenience
This 1922 photo taken by Eugene Armbruster shows the Metropolitan Avenue streetscape near present-day
78th Street in Middle Village. The three-story former Brick Tavern, built and opened in 1845, is shown in the
background at left. Courtesy Greater Ridgewood Historical Society
A 2017 photo of Community United Methodist Church in Middle Village. Photo by Robert Pozarycki
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