Two Hundred and Fifty Plus, 8

The oldest religious building in New York, the Friends Meeting House in Flushing, was originally constructed in 1694, and greatly expanded by 1719. So even the big alteration was some sixty years before the American Revolution. It is a fairly simply wood-frame building and both physically and in its current use would be recognizable to the early-1700s congregants, although I assume the electric lights would surprise them. While we’ve never worked on the building, it makes up a surprisingly large chunk of my childhood mythology. We lived about three-quarters of a mile south of the Meeting House, but it’s on Northern Boulevard, which has always been one of the two principal streets of downtown Flushing. Northern is a Frankenstein street, created by combining several large streets stretching across the width of Queens; the central Flushing portion used to be Broadway for the town of Flushing. (The other main street was and still is Main Street, although a late-1970s McDonalds’s ad had it…