A mural at Trans Pecos in Ridgewood

Mural that used to be on the wall at the old Silent Barn.

Oops, the Times did it again: nearly three years after it first noted that Ridgewood, Queens was “attracting a different type of émigré: artists priced out of Williamsburg in search of cheaper lofts,” and a little over a year after it again noted that more and more Brooklynites were moving there, the paper goes back to the well to remind us that “Ridgewood is in the chrysalis stage of an outer-borough transformation that shrieks ‘Brooklyn.’ Except it’s not in that overhyped borough.”

The Styles piece starts at Gottscheer Hall, reporting that the 90-year-old bar’s survival “can be credited to the younger crowd in the bar up front, where artsy types in their 20s and 30s, wearing hoodies and black-frame glasses, huddled over mugs of Spaten.” In other words, as Queens Courier put it back in July, the bar “turned a profit in 2012 because of younger, more affluent patrons who began to appear in larger and larger groups.” (At least the Times didn’t repeat the mistake of using the word “hipster.”)

What follows is more or less the same thing that’s been said since 2011, when Metro noted that Ridgewood was “the next big thing,” and “the beneficiary of the gentrification bug spreading east” — and Hyperallergic noted the neighborhood was getting “art-ified.” In April of this year, the Daily News once again declared Ridgewood the “‘next big thing’ for creative types priced out of hip Brooklyn neighborhoods.” Or as the Times now describes the demographic: “broke millennials, underemployed artists, craven property speculators, fearful natives and first-time homeowners priced out of other markets.”

But this time, everyone has just about had it with the whole “A Touch of Brooklyn… in Ridgewood, Queens?” thing. It seems the callback of the word “Quooklyn” was the last straw.

In an open letter to the Times, Ridgewood Social vehemently disagrees that “comparisons to Bushwick are unavoidable”: “Finally,” writes the site’s editor, Sarah Feldman, “you and your peers are so drained and tapped out of your creative juices you must compare us to the new sights and frightening changes in Brooklyn.”

Others are mocking the Times for self-congratualtorily pretending that “in a nod to Ridgewood’s burgeoning trendiness, some are even calling it ‘Quooklyn,’ after a dining reporter for The New York Times coined the term in a June review of Houdini Pizza Laboratory.”

And still others are nervous that Ridgewood is about to get as “overhyped” as Brooklyn. Here are some of the stronger reactions we came across on Twitter.

Correction: The original version of this post was imprecise in identifying the mural in the photo. It was left over from Silent Barn and is no longer up at Trans-Pecos.