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.

In the closing decades of the 19th century, New York underwent a profound physical and cultural transformation. Fueled by the wealth of the exploding financial and manufacturing sectors, the city rapidly evolved into a world-class metropolis. The bold ambitions of civic and business leaders, architects, and engineers of the era manifested in landmarks such as the vast Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the stately U.S. Custom House, the towering Municipal Building, and the original terminus of New York City’s first official subway line—the ornate City Hall stop. The sweeping interior spaces common to all of these structures, and hundreds of others, depended upon a venerable Mediterranean building technology adapted to contemporary American construction: arched tile ceilings—or vaults—that were not only self-supporting but could also bear the weight of floors or roofs above them. These vaults were designed and built by a single New York firm, founded by Spanish immigrant Rafael Guastavino (1842-1908) and later headed by his son Rafael Jr. (1872-1950). The Guastavinos’ patented system for building domes and vaults involved multiple layers of thin ceramic tiles bonded with quick-drying mortar. The resulting structures were not only exceptionally strong, but also lightweight, easy to build, and inherently beautiful, thanks to intricate patterns of exposed tile that formed finished, decorative surfaces. Guastavino vaults figured prominently in more than 1,000 projects across the nation, including 200 in Manhattan alone. During its 73-year history, the Guastavino Company helped build some of the most impressive interior spaces in America—veritable palaces for the people. This list based on MCNY's exhibition Palaces for the People, contains many of Guastavino's masterpieces in the five boroughs, both those that remain and those that have been lost to the wrecking ball.

Did you know that the construction of the IRT Flushing line (known as the Corona Line until 1925) was the catalyst for real estate development that transformed the rural areas of Queens into vibrant neighborhoods?

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.

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!

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.