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.

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.