Fitzgerald/Ginsberg Mansion ARCHITECT: John Oakman DATE: 1924 STYLE: Tudor Revival This house was built in 1924 for Charles and Florence Fitzgerald, two affluent New Yorkers, who then sold it to Ethel and Morris Ginsberg in 1926. The Ginsbergs were a prominent family that made its fortune supplying sash, door and wooden trim for builders. It is an example of a Tudor Revival style mansion in Flushing and it was owned by the Ginsberg family for more than seventy years.

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.

Fitzgerald-Ginsberg Mansion, ca. 1924. This Tudor Revivial mansion was built in 1924, designed by architect John Oakman, for Charles and Florence Fitzgerald. The house was constructed immediately adjacent to an area of the Old Country Club and golf course, one of the oldest country clubs in America. Two years after the home was completed the Fitzgeralds sold it to Morris and Ethel Ginsberg, whose family remained there for seventy years. Once one of many large, picturesque, revival-style houses that dotted the outer boroughs—evidence of the prosperity and affluence of the 1920s—this house is, according to the LPC, "one of the last great mansions from this period still standing in Flushing."