Flushing’s St. George Church Carries On

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    In the evening of September 16th, 2010, a large storm front swept through the general NYC area with high winds and heavy rain. The storm was strong enough to produce two tornadoes, one of which struck mid-Brooklyn, the other mid-Queens including Forest Hills and Flushing, leaving toppled trees in its wake.

    The storm also left structural damage to countless homes and a falling tree killed a Queens woman who had just replaced her husband behind the wheel in a car stopped on Grand Central Parkway. The storm came and went quickly in about twenty minutes, but it will be remembered for much longer than that. It claimed an iconic casualty in the 45-foot tall wooden spire of St. George Church on Main Street and 37th Avenue in Flushing, a town and neighborhood centerpiece for now 160 years.

    If you look at photos of old Main Street in Flushing beginning from the 1870s until today, the scene changes from a shady unpaved country lane till the extraordinarily dense crossroads of eastern Queens it has become — one of the most densely populated areas in the entire northeast. One constant could be made out…

     

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    … St. George Church’s tall, tapering steeple.

    The church was founded in 1702, and the present church is the third on the site, constructed from 1853-1854. According to the American Guild of Organists, the church “was designed by Frank Wills and Henry Dudley, architects associated with The New York Ecclesiological Society that had an interest in the development of Gothic Architecture as a new style (Neo-Gothic) for American churches. Local craftsmen were engaged and regional materials were used. The building includes walls of randomly laid granite rubble, fine stained glass windows. Above the entrance is a 150-foot tapered stone tower that houses a bell recast at Troy, NY, using the 1760 bell’s metal and bearing the inscription, “The gift of John Aspinwall, Gentleman, 1760.”

     

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    The St. George churchyard contains extraordinarily old stones, some of which were laid in the 1700s. St. George’s churchyard bears stones with names now found on Queens maps, such as Lawrences, Pecks, and Cornells. The churchyard has overlooked a Main Street that has seen many incarnations, from a dusty, wagon-plied small town track to one of the busiest streets in the borough of Queens.

    The storm itself was a shocker – light afternoon showers were predicted and meteorologists were puzzled about the storm’s ferocity. Entire blocks in Park Slope, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Forest Hills, Flushing, and Bayside were shorn of trees, whose trunks were sheared and twisted and in some occasions snapped in half by up to 125 MPH wind.

    But seeing St. George’s steeple fall into the middle of Main Street might have been the biggest shocker of them all.

    Scaffolding has appeared around the steeple “stump” and the ancient edifice (which by a long shot isn’t the oldest house of worship in Flushing, the title goes to the 1695 Quaker Meeting House on Northern Boulevard) may yet get a new steeple.

    Kevin Walsh’s website is Forgotten New York; his book of the same name is also available.

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