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 in Flushing has been the commercial center of Flushing for literally centuries. This 1935 image reflects this commercial nature with a series of storefronts: a furniture store, hat shoppe, dress store, sign shop, glove shop, dance hall, and chop suey restaurant. The types of businesses have changed and the wood-frame structures of the late 19th and early 20th century are no more, but the residents of Flushing and beyond still walk this street to shop.

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.

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.

Broadway & Lawrence Street, 1912.

Flushing Bridge, c. 1905. The Flushing Bridge, also known as the Northern Boulevard Crossing, is located at the site of the oldest crossing of the Flushing River which was built between 1800 and 1801. Multiple variations of this crossing were built between the first structure and the current bridge, which opened in 1980. Pictured here is a swing-bridge variation that was free to cross (other iterations required a toll) unless you exceeded the speed limit of five miles per hour.

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.

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.

Opened on Christmas Day 1928 and designed by noted theatre architect Thomas Lamb, the RKO Keith's Theatre was a vaudeville and movie house. Some early live performers included Bob Hope, Mae West, and the Marx Brothers. Though the exterior of the building was designed plainly, the interior was quite extravagant, with a grand lobby and a Spanish Baroque Revival style auditorium. The theatre closed in 1986 and has lived a very hard life since then (as is evident from its current exterior). Despite the lobby and foyer being landmarked the owner of the building (after the theatre's closure) removed features, did nothing to prevent theft, and actively destroyed the interior, admitting during a trial to leaking 200 gallons of oil from the theatre’s furnace into the basement. Despite an active preservation community interested in the building, it has changed ownership a number of times in recent years and its future remains in question.

Ye Olden Tavern (Fountain House) at 3609 Main Street, ca. 1901. The Ye Olden Tavern stood at the southeast corner Northen Boulevard (then, Broadway) and Main Street for nearly two centuries before torn down in the early 20th century. In its last years, the owners called it Ye Olde Tavern.

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.