The oldest religious building in New York, the Friends Meeting House in Flushing, was originally constructed in 1694, and greatly expanded by 1719. So even the big alteration was some sixty years before the American Revolution. It is a fairly simply wood-frame building and both physically and in its current use would be recognizable to the early-1700s congregants, although I assume the electric lights would surprise them.
While we’ve never worked on the building, it makes up a surprisingly large chunk of my childhood mythology. We lived about three-quarters of a mile south of the Meeting House, but it’s on Northern Boulevard, which has always been one of the two principal streets of downtown Flushing. Northern is a Frankenstein street, created by combining several large streets stretching across the width of Queens; the central Flushing portion used to be Broadway for the town of Flushing. (The other main street was and still is Main Street, although a late-1970s McDonalds’s ad had it as Maine Street.) As a result, a lot of important buildings are on a few blocks of Northern. There’s the Meeting House, there is Flushing High School, there was the RKO Keiths theater, there is the Flushing W.M.C.A. and there is the Northern Boulevard Armory, constructed in 1904 for a New York State militia regiment and now used by the police.
As a kid, I was frequently at the theater and the Y, so I was frequently walking by the Meeting House, with its state historic-place sign, and the over-the-top romantic-castle armory. When you’re a child, old is old without much nuance; in the mid-1970s the difference between the real 280-year-old Meeting House and the 70-year-old revival-architecture armory was not at all clear, and I assumed there was some kind of relationship between them.
Part 1, Fraunces Tavern: here.
Part 2, St. Paul’s Chapel: here.
Part 3, Fort Ticonderoga: here.
Part 4, Philipse Manor Hall: here.
Part 5: Vander Ende-Onderdonk House: here.
Part 6: Roslyn Grist Mill: here.
Part 7: Connetquot Mill: here.
Like this? Then read the “Witnessing the Revolution” series by Cirrus Structural Engineering
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