Ridgewood Democratic Club

60-70 Putnam Avenue | Ridgewood | built 1911

Open on the map4 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1911

    A three-story apartment house rises at 60-70 Putnam Avenue for Paul Stier, later the Ridgewood Democratic Club

    Paul Stier was the original owner of this Renaissance Revival building, about 1911, under permit NB 1725-1911, with Louis Berger & Company as architects. It rises three stories over a basement, with stained-glass windows on each side of a central door and rusticated brick bands between the upper windows. A bracketed cornice runs around the north and east sides. The ground-floor front was later reconfigured and refaced in blond brick, and a two-story brick addition stands at the back.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1917

    The Ridgewood Democratic Club moves into the former Stier building after enlarging it

    The Ridgewood Democratic Club, founded in 1908, bought this building, formerly owned by Paul Stier, in 1916. In 1917 it renovated and expanded the house, adding a big two-story wing with a full basement at the rear, and moved in the same year. Membership reached 1,400 soon after the move and later peaked at about 2,000 before falling off after 1950, according to former club president Charles Ober.

    Source: Forgotten New York

  3. 2013

    September 24

    The clubhouse's original stained-glass windows, marked with an interlocking RDC, are being renovated

    Writing in Brownstoner in September 2013, Kevin Walsh found the clubhouse at Putnam Avenue and Stier Place largely unchanged since at least the 1930s. Its original stained-glass windows, each bearing the initials RDC intertwined, were being renovated. Inside, the lobby floor spells out the club's name in mosaic, and a painting of founder Carl Berger, who led the club as president for about twenty years, hangs above a brass plaque.

    Source: brownstoner.com

  4. 2025

    June 15

    The clubhouse walls are covered with a century of Democratic campaign posters

    A June 2025 Forgotten New York post showed the club's interior, where the walls hold posters for candidates who won and lost over roughly a hundred years. Among them are John F. Kennedy and his brother Ted, Al Smith, who ran for president in 1928, Geraldine Ferraro, Barack Obama, Mario Cuomo, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and mayors Abe Beame, David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio. A 1998 poster for Eliot Spitzer's attorney general race sits at the top of one wall.

    Source: Forgotten New York

Nearby

All 1,266 buildings with stories in Ridgewood