In Memoriam: the Koenig-Boker House

Way up in College Point, the dead-end Boker Court curves around a quartet of newish tract houses. As it turns out, Boker Court was laid out like that circa 1900 to angle around the Koenig-Boker Mansion, which formerly stood on the right side of the street. Only the dead-end Boker Court is left as a reminder of it.

In the mid-1800s, Frederick Koenig, a German banker and a partner with Conrad Poppenhusen, built a large, wood-framed, hip-roofed mansion with a wraparound porch colonnade at where 120^th Street north of 14^th Avenue would be. After Koenig returned to Germany he sold it to another German businessman, Frank Boker. The short driveway to the mansion from 120^th Street was named for him. The mansion became a hotel, the College Point Clubhouse, was divided into apartments, all the time falling into greater and greater decrepitude. At length, it was razed in 2004.

The old mansion stood in the middle of 120^th Street: it was in a bad position when cross streets were cut through early in the 20^th Century, and unlike other houses in this circumstance, it was never moved. When the tract houses were built around 2005, 120th Street was newly straightened.

The old Grandview Hotel, which sits at the center of a traffic circle at 13^th Avenue and 123^rd Street, was in a similar circumstance, but the unusual situation was preserved in this case.

The red-bricked, dormer-windowed Grandview Hotel was built in 1853 as Herman Schleicher’s mansion. Schleicher supported the South in the Civil War, and ran guns to the Confederates. It later became the Grandview  (its elevation permitted views of the East River and Flushing Bay) and later became divided into apartments, in which condition it survives today.