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There are surprises to be found on the side streets of Queens, especially ion the older neighborhoods like Jamaica, first settled in the mid-1600s by Dutchmen.

Yet another in Jamaica’s collection of very old church buildings is the First Presbyterian Church at 89-60 164th Street, just north of Jamaica Avenue. Jamaica’s Presbyterian congregation, founded in 1663, may be the oldest continuous one in the United States. The church is housed in three buildings on 164th, two of them very old.

The original congregation’s stone church stood from 1699 to 1813 at what is now Jamaica Avenue and Union Hall Street; during the Revolutionary War, the British commandeered it and imprisoned patriots there. In 1813, it was replaced with what is now the church sanctuary in a location at Jamaica Avenue and 163rd Street: it was placed on logs and pulled by mule to its present location in 1920. The First Presbyterian’s manse, or staff living quarters, was erected on Jamaica Avenue in 1834 and it was moved to a location just to the north of the sanctuary, well back from the street, that same year.

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In 1925, the Magill Memorial Building, a combined church, auditorium and library that also included a gym and bowling alleys(!) was built just north of the manse.

Decades before the Emancipation Proclamation, First Presbyterian had been a force in the struggle to eradicate slavery. It issued a proclamation in 1787 recommending that all people under the church’s care should work toward abolition; during the Civil War several members volunteered for duty, and the church hosted a regiment of Connecticut soldiers when their Long Island Rail Road train broke down in Jamaica.

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A bit further north on 164th Street we come to a classic neon shoe store sign at Leonard’s Bootery. The “Enna Jettick” on the sign was a line of women’s shoes manufactured by Dunn and McCarthy of Auburn, New York, which had been in business since 1867. “Enna Jetticks” dominated the field for many years, as they offered dozens of styles at affordable prices well into the 1960s: you wonder why Sterling Cooper, the Mad Men ad firm, never tried to acquire their account.


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