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.

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.