Hamilton Hall was a school for the local parish of St. George. The simple two-story building was erected at a site on the corner of what is now Main Street and 39th Avenue. Built in 1803 at the cost of $520, the school was never a financial success and changed hands between the parish and a board of trustees from the local community a number of times in its early years. The school failed and the building was then used as a Sunday School for the church. At some point, it is unclear as to when, the building was moved to the corner of 37th Avenue and Prince Street. By the late 19th century the building functioned as a tenement house and it was still standing and in good repair in 1922 when this photograph was captured.

Main Street Flushing, 1923. St. George’s church, seen near the center of the photo, was established in 1702 as mission from the church in England. The mission's reverend George Keith had been a former Quaker and upon his arrival, declared his missions intentions at the nearby Quaker meeting house, where he would return frequently for conversation and debate. Despite this lively engagement, the first church building wasn't built until 1715, with services held at the nearby Guard House. Initially sharing its Reverend with Newtown and Jamaica, this union ended after a century when in 1803 the vestry of St. George's voted to secure its own reverend with Newtown. This continued to 1809, whereupon St. George's secured its own independence. The building it currently occupies is the third on this site, built in 1854. The rich history of St. George's was recognized in 2003 when the Landmarks Commission granted landmark status to the church building, old parish house and the graveyard. In 2010, the steeple was torn off during an intense storm. It was rebuilt in 2013.

My Archive Spring 2019 "It was June 20, 1974, and it was the graduation of I.S. 145 in Jackson Heights." —Teri Graham

While Flushing is home to some of the oldest buildings in New York City and many historic religious and civic buildings remain preserved, most of the housing stock from the 19th century has been demolished and updated to modern standards. This row of wood-frame homes on 37th Avenue disappeared long ago and in its place, now, a series of simple brick storefronts with residences above occupied by Flushing's thriving Asian businesses and communities.

Main Street and 38th Avenue. St. George's Parish and Cemetery, 1935. The cemetery at St. George's was established at the parish's founding in 1746. While the church has gone through three structures on the site (the current building was completed in 1854), the cemetery has survived more than 250 years. The cemetery was in active use until 1887, thought it had been running out of space since the 1840s. According to a 19th century source, some of the graves were disinterred and moved to a larger public cemetery, while fallen stones were gathered in a heap at the back of the property. During a review by the Landmarks Commission in 2000, the graveyard was found to have 50 markers remaining along the north and south sides of the church and nine burial vaults dating to the 1840s.

Flushing Branch, QPL 41-17 Main Street Polshek Partnership, 1998 The Flushing Branch of the QBPL was Queens’ first public library. Established as the Flushing Library Association in 1858 and open to members as a subscription library, it became a free circulating library in 1869. In 1906, a Carnegie-funded structure designed by Lord & Hewlett in the Georgian Revival style replaced the wood frame building on this site. The Carnegie building was demolished in the mid-1950s and replaced with a Modern style building, completed in 1957. In 1993, that building was demolished to make way for the branch’s latest phase, a sweeping glass and steel structure completed in 1998.

This is a collection of the smaller burial places that dot the landscape of the five boroughs. They are family burial plots and church graveyards, some full of 300-year-old grave markers and some with no monuments at all, some squished between storefronts and major thoroughfares and others hidden behind homes and walls. While most remain extant (if not always accessible), some have been lost to time and development.

St. George's Episcopal Church (the wood-frame structure in the distance. This second church building was constructed 1812 (or 1812, sources differ). It was demolished by 1930.

The three story wood-frame building on the corner of Main Street and 38th Avenue was once the home of the Flushing Female Seminary, a boarding and day school for young women. The school was in existence by the years after the Civil War, perhaps earlier. The building was no longer in use a school by the time this photograph was taken in 1922.

St. Joseph's Home for Girls, 1927 In the middle of the 19th century the Sisters of St. Joseph moved their mother-house, novitiate, and boarding school from Williamsburg, Brooklyn to Flushing, Queens. A new wing was added in the late 1870s. The building, which became more of an orphanage in its later history, was lost to a fire in the 1960s and replaced by a department store.

LIRR Station on Main Street in Flushing, N.Y., 1910. The Long Island Rail Road has been serving Flushing since the 1870s, but the original terminal was built in 1853 as part of the New York and Flushing Rail Road.

Queens is such an integral part of the metropolis that is hard for us to think of it as rural and agricultural. But when New York was New Amsterdam, Queens was no more than a series of remote villages scattered between the Dutch Brooklyn (Breukelen) and the English eastern Long Island settlements. As Dutch and English settlers moved closer to one another, they began to assimilate in what would later become Queens County. The Dutch colonial government of New Amsterdam exercised political and military control of this area, but permitted, even welcomed English settlement. The Dutch chartered Hempstead (Heemstede) in 1644, Flushing (Vlissingen) in 1645, Newtown (Middelburgh) in 1652, and Jamaica (Rustdorp) in 1656. These were predominately English towns, but they differed from the settlements at the eastern end of Long Island, not only in their recognition of the Dutch government and their accommodation of Dutch settlers but also in harboring many religious dissenters. These towns proved to be a comfortable place for Quakers in particular. Nowhere more so than Flushing was this religious welcoming evident. When the colonial government forbade the entertaining of Quakers, thirty inhabitants issued the Flushing Remonstrance objecting to the order on December 27, 1657. Today this document is considered instrumental to the concept of religious liberty. The tradition of acceptance and diversity is continued in Flushing, which is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Queens County with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Pakistani, Afghan, and Indonesian communities.

The Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church is the third oldest church in Flushing (a neighborhood with quite a few old churches). The congregation was established in 1811 by a community of freed slaves, American Indians, and whites. The community first met in a series of homes, but the first church building was completed in 1837 near to the current church site. The building seen in this 1927 photograph was constructed around the turn of the 20th century. The pastor at the time, Rev. Charles J. Lawton, had big plans for the church as part of the Flushing community and the congregation was very involved in the construction of the new church. Male church members worked to build the brick foundation, while female members cleaned each individual recycled brick that was used in the construction. That building was razed in the early 1930s for a new structure, dedicated in 1932, that can be seen today behind the 1950s community center addition at the corner