Lithuanian restaurant at Union Avenue and Stagg Street. September 24, 1941. In the early 20th century, Eastern European immigrants began to settle in Williamsburg, including a significant Lithuanian community (today, the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary continues to provide services in Lithuanian). Across Union Avenue from the restaurant is Lithuanian Square (then Lituanica Square), a small gore park with a monument to two Lithuanian aviators who perished in a 1933 attempt to complete a transatlantic flight from Brooklyn to Kaunas, Lithuania.

106 Powers Street, 1937. Situated among attached vernacular residential buildings, this unassuming structure on Powers Street played a major role in the religious history of New York City. The simple peaked roof building was constructed in 1885 by architect O. H. Doolittle for a Methodist Episcopal Church. The Methodists vacated the building by the turn of the century and it was soon after occupied the Powers Street Gospel Mission Church. In 1913 the building became the clubhouse and assembly hall of the local Democratic party. In 1931 the church and its parish house neighbor were sold to the American Mohammedan Society, and became the first mosque in New York City. While Muslims had worshiped in various informal venues in the city, this was the first long-surviving dedicated mosque. (Alexander Russell Webb, an early American Muslim convert had established a mosque on Broadway in 1895, but it was extremely short-lived.) Founded in 1907, Society was established by a group of Eastern European Muslim Tatars who settled in Williamsburg. While various buildings around the city have switched from church to synagogue and visa versa, this was a new kind of religious conversion: from church to mosque. And while most later purpose-built mosques in the city follow a specific and particular architectural style (onion domes, minarets, and decorative tile), this church building would have looked like the perfect venue for the Muslim Tatars. In their homeland, they would have worshiped in simple wood-frame mosques. The society added a tiny wooden minaret on the roof and a crescent moon on the facade, and for the next half-century worshiped here as a tight-knit community. In 1962, Joseph Mitchell, noted journalist and poetic explorer of New York's historic locales, wrote of the mosque, " It is a steep-roofed, clapboard-sided, two-story building with tall wooden doors and tall, colored-glass windows. Except for one appendage, it closely resembles a New England town hall." The community that once worshiped here has dispersed; there is no longer a Tatar population in Williamsburg. Today the building houses the Brooklyn Moslem Mosque, which, though well kept, is largely unused except for religious festivals like Eid and Ramadan.

(Former) Colored School No. 3, later Public School 69 ARCHITECT: Samuel B. Leonard DATE: 1879-81 STYLE: Romanesque Revival Built in 1879-81, the former Colored School No. 3 schoolhouse was designed by architect Samuel B. Leonard, the Superintendent of Buildings and Repairs for the Brooklyn Board of Education. The only known “colored” school building remaining in Brooklyn, Colored School No. 3 as an institution evolved from the town of Williamsburgh’s original African Free School, which had been founded prior to 1841. The school was taken over by the Board of Education of the City of Brooklyn in 1855, when it was given the name “Colored School No. 3.” It was renamed P.S. 69 in 1887, and was later absorbed by the school system of the City of New York after the consolidation of 1898. Romanesque Revival in style, the school building has arched window openings and a prominent entrance with large keystones, a raised central section with a gable and blind arcade, corbelled brickwork, and dentil courses.

Muslims make up approximately 9% of New York City's population. In the early 20th century, a portion of lower Manhattan was known as "Little Syria," where the New York Sun reported a "Turkish Chapel" on Rector Street, while in Brooklyn, a group of Eastern European Muslims converted a church into a place for them to worship. In more recent years, Muslims from all over have moved to the city to made it their home.