Flushing was established by Dutch settlers in 1645 as the town of "Vlissingen," part of the larger New Netherland colony. The town's development was strongly influenced by its Quaker community, with freedom of religion as one of its founding principles. How many of these historic sites of Flushing have you visited?

James A. Renwick House. James A. Renwick was a lawyer and the nephew of James Renwick, the famous architect.

Though Flushing is well known as being a cultural hub, many might not be aware of its integral part in the establishment of religious freedom in New York

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.

Built c. 1661, the Bowne House is a microcosm of social, cultural, and political history. It is one of the oldest surviving structures in New York City and the oldest in Queens.

Flushing High School, April 8, 1921. Flushing High School was founded in 1875 and is the oldest public high school in New York City. The school began with seven students and six of them graduating in 1878! The original building was three stories, had only two official classrooms, and the janitor and his family lived in the basement. By the turn of the century, the student population of the school had grown and a large addition was constructed onto the original building. In 1907 a Board of Education member and Flushing resident began the fight for a larger, modern school in Flushing. That fight would last nine years. In 1915 the new C.B.J. Snyder designed school opened for students. The imposing Neo-Gothic (sometimes called Collegiate Gothic) style building features a five-story tower, buff-colored brick, turrets, and gargoyles, all reminiscent of British medieval universities.

The 1862 Flushing Town Hall is a Romanesque Revival style building. Popular during the Civil War, this style can be seen in hundreds of other buildings throughout the city. The two story building has a grand triple-arched portico for an entrance. It served as the seat of government of the village of Flushing until the consolidation of Greater New York City in 1898. Early photographs of the building, including this one from 1922, show a light colored building. The building facade had long been painted— layer upon layer—with white paint. During the 1990s renovation, the original brown and beige stone and brick were revealed and deemed safer for continued preservation.

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.

Lewis H. Latimer House Museum Designated: March 21, 1995 34-41 137th St, Queens 34-41 137th Street was the home of the African-American inventor, Lewis H. Latimer, renowned for his work in the field of electric lighting. In 1881, Latimer received a patent for an improved method for the production of carbon filaments used in lightbulbs. The house was built in a Queen Anne style frame house, and it offered a comfortable meeting place for prominent African-American civic and cultural leaders. Watch the virtual tour of Latimer House

Broadway & Lawrence Street, 1912.

Captain John Aspinwall built this house in 1760. John Aspinwall was of the most renowned captains of the New York merchant mariners in pre-Revolutionary times. The Captain owned a large amount of real estate in the city, including this house in Flushing. A famous and bizarre anecdote: a law in 1761 was passed to disallow buildings south of Duane street (then Fresh Water) to be constructed out of wood. This was a preventative measure in case of fires. The legislation was met with absolute disagreement and a petition was created to reverse this law. The document claimed stone and brick would be a financial burden, and "useful members of society will be unable to pay their just debts, the wives and families of many will become burdensome to the city, and jails will be filled with objects of the greatest compassion." Whose name was at the top of the petition? None other than Captain John Aspinwall himself. The law was successfully reversed. As fate would have it, the area would see its first fire two years later. Trinity Church, which Aspinwall had been a vestryman of, and 500 other buildings were ravaged. The Captain settled in this house in the 1770s. He assisted in the construction of a church in the neighborhood. His home was later owned by his son-in-law, Colonel Richard Platt.

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.

John Bowne House, May 1918. John Bowne was an English immigrant to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, who settled in Flushing (originally called Vlissingen) in the early 1660s. He and his first wife converted to Quakerism after marriage, and their move to Flushing was motivated by a desire to join the English-speaking Society of Friends there. In 1662, Bowne was arrested on the orders of Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant for having a Quaker meeting in his home. Stuyvesant had long persecuted the Quaker communities of New York. Bowne was sent to the Netherlands, and despite not speaking any Dutch, appealed to the Dutch West India Company for freedom. With his release, a new precedent was set for religious tolerance and freedom in the colony. The home where Bowne was arrested still stands. Likely built in 1661 (a year before his arrest), it is a wood-frame home of Dutch design but constructed with English building techniques. The home was altered, unsurprisingly, a number of times in the centuries since it was built. Members of the Bowne family continued to live in the home until 1945 when they sold it to the newly-created Bowne House Historical Society, which opened it as a museum in 1947 and continues to operate it today.

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.

Weeping Beech Tree, undated photo. Unbeknownst to the throngs of present day Flushing denizens, the town of Flushing was once the "cradle of America's horticultural business." The Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nursery was founded in 1737 by Robert Prince and provided maple trees to Jefferson's Monticello, among other influential customers. In the late 1830s, Samuel Parsons, a local Quaker, established his own nursery business, which would go on to provide the original trees and shrubs for both Central Park and Prospect Park. His business became America's most celebrated commercial nursery. Parsons was a pioneering horticulturalist who introduced a number of plant species to North America. In 1847 he returned from a trip to Belgium with a four-inch-tall cutting of a weeping beach tree. He planted it near the John Bowne House (his wife was a Bowne descendant) and it grew... and grew. By the middle of the 20th century the tree was massive: 60-feet-tall, with a 14-foot trunk, and an 85-foot-wide umbrella of branches. This tree was considered the mother of all other weeping beech trees in the United States. In 1966 the tree was designated a living landmark, along with the 1885-planted magnolia grandiflora on Lafayette Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Despite more than a century of hardy growth, the weeping beech began to deteriorate in the 1970s. Even with serious efforts, including fertilizer injections and cables to keep it standing, the tree was pronounced dead in 1998. Following a brief funeral, the landmark tree was chopped down from its spot behind Kingsland Homestead, the home to the Queens Historical Society. A considerable stump and a number of weeping beech offspring remain. The younger beech trees have thrived since the loss of their progenitor, growing to considerable height themselves.

Lomax Littlejohn (who has, perhaps, the best name ever) moved to the United States from Liverpool, England in 1851 at age ten. His father worked as an importer of iron and metals, and Lomax became one the city's largest handlers of East India goods in the early 20th century. This home was demolished sometime after the photograph was taken in 1922 and when the Flushing YMCA building broke ground in 1924. The Flushing YMCA, which still stands, was completed in March 1926. It is well known for its swimming program which has produced a number of Olympians.

In 1931 Rex Cole, the appliance showman commissioned the architect of the black and gold American Radiator Building, Raymond Hood, to design a series of showrooms to display his General Electric refrigerators. This showroom in Flushing was built to look like the product it sold. Set among the then wood-frame residential buildings of the neighborhood, this modern structure was eye-catching. The three-story white cube with large, nearly full high central windows, even included a decorative feature at the top to mimic the monitor top of a refrigerator.

A 1924 view of the Bowne House depicts some of the trees and landscaping that have been a part of the Bowne House plot since at least the early 19th century. Flushing was well known in the 1800s as the home of a number of nurseries. The most famous was the Parsons Nursery, where proprietor Samuel Parsons traveled the world to find new and exotic plants. By the early 1800s members of the Parsons family had married into the Bowne family and were living in the house. It is believed that most of the gardens and large trees that surround the house date to that time period.

Flushing Armory, ca. 1910. Designed by George Heins (known best for his early subway station architecture with partner Christopher LaFarge), and completed in 1905, the Flushing Armory was originally the home of the 17th Separate Company. The crenelated building was nearly identical to Hein's designs for three other armories in upstate New York. While this design did not break the mold of New York City armory styles (nearly all of the 19th and early 20th century armories in the five boroughs are castle-like), Heins did prefer octagonal towers to round ones. The 17th Separate Company was founded in 1876, and between 1894 and 1905 occupied a wood and brick armory on Roosevelt Avenue. The 17th Separate became Company 1 after the First World War and moved to Brooklyn’s 14th Regiment. Other military units were housed here throughout the 20th century. Eventually turned over to the city, the old armory served as a homeless shelter (a common reprogramming of these large spaces) and a gymnastics center. Today it is the headquarters of the NYPD’s Queens North Taskforce.

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.

Listen to the Gotham Center and Micheal Hutton's podcast on the history of the Quaker Meeting House, one of the important sites of religious freedom in the US, while examining these related archival images!

John Bowne’s House John Bowne’s house became a landmark in American Quaker history and a symbol of the early struggle for religious freedom in New Netherland. One of the city’s few surviving 17th-century buildings, the house is now a museum. This postcard is modeled on an 1825 lithograph by Charles Etienne Pierre Motte. Image Info: Artvue Post Card Co., ca. 1955 CREDIT: Museum of the City of New York, Postcard Collection, F2011.33.1467

Not all New York City landmarks are made of stone or steel or glass. Here is a list of some of the city's famous topiary, both long gone and still standing. Much like buildings, these trees 🌳 🌳 dominated streetscapes, provided community gathering places, and witnessed history.

Flushing High School 35-01 Union Street, Flushing, Queens 1915 Founded in 1875, Flushing High School is the oldest public high school in New York City. Its distinctive Neo-Gothic style building, built of buff-colored brick, terra cotta, and granite was constructed between 1912 and 1915, with another wing added in 1954. The most dominant feature is the entrance: a five story, square central tower, which is an element closely associated with Gothic architecture. One of her most famous alumni is fictional character, Archie Bunker. It was designated as a New York City Landmark in 1991 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992.

The Quaker Meeting House sits adjacent to the Quaker cemetery. Both are situated on land purchased and donated by prominent Flushing citizen and Quaker, John Bowne (who was once arrested for having a Quaker meeting in his home). This 1925 photograph captures a view of the cemetery and the meeting house. During the early years after the founding of the Meeting House, an unknown number of Quakers were buried here without headstones, as was the custom of the time. During the 18th century burials began to be accompanied by simple stones that usually only noted a name or initials.

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.

Flushing High School ARCHITECT: C.B.J. Snyder DATE: 1912-15 STYLE: Collegiate Gothic Built between 1912 and 1915, this is the oldest public high school in New York City. It was designed by C.B.J. Snyder, a prominent architect who designed several schools in the five boroughs. It is an example of the Collegiate Gothic style, and it features a monumental square entrance tower, a picturesque auditorium wing, and Gothic-inspired ornament.

The Old Quaker Meeting House is one of the oldest houses of worship in New York State. At least one-third of the current building (the section closest to Union Street) dated to 1694 when the wood-frame structure was constructed on land purchased by John Bowne and John Rodman. The building was expanded in 1716 and 1719. The particularly steep roof is evocative of medieval Dutch architecture, and the interiors remain in the simple style of the Society of Friends: dark floorboards and plain benches. The building continues to be the place of worship for the Flushing Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. It has served this purpose for more than 300 years.

Linden Place, west side at 34th Avenue, 1932.

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

Weeping Beech Weeping Beech tree. The tree stood in the Kingsland Homestead until 1998.