The Queens Masonic lodge geography behind Advance Service Mizpah Lodge, from Grand Street in Manhattan to a temple on 30th Avenue in Astoria.
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Queens Masonic lodge geography follows the routes people could travel and the rooms they could reach. The six lodges in the lineage of Advance Service Mizpah Lodge began in Manhattan and across Queens, then came together at the Advance temple in Astoria.
In December 1871 the New York Times printed a funeral notice for a man from Astoria and invited the members of two lodges, Advance and Island City. It added a practical detail.
Carriages would be waiting at Hunter’s Point, in Long Island City, and at the Ninety-second Street Ferry in Astoria until ten o’clock in the morning.
That sentence is a map. In the nineteenth century, attending a lodge or a brother’s funeral could depend on where the ferries and carriages could take a man.
This article follows the lineage across Manhattan, Hunters Point, Astoria, Newtown and Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, and Flushing. It ends where the combined lodge meets today, in Astoria.
From Grand Street to the Waterfront
The oldest charter in the family is City Lodge’s, granted by the Grand Lodge of New York on September 1, 1856.
The lodge began in a small room in Florence Hall and then met for years in Odd Fellows’ Hall at 165–171 Grand Street, at the corner of Centre, in a neighborhood now known as Little Italy and SoHo.
Its summonses of the 1860s call the room the Corinthian Room.
The lodge did not stay. By April 1870 it was at 594 Broadway, in what is now SoHo. In April 1873 it was at Bleecker and Morton Streets in Greenwich Village.
By October 1874 it was at 33 Union Square. In 1875, the first year the Grand Lodge’s new Masonic Temple at 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue was open, it met in the Ionic Room there.
The sources in hand do not say why it moved. The addresses trace a general movement north and west, away from its Grand Street rooms.
Its social life reached across Manhattan too. It planned a Masonic ball at the Revere House on Broadway, held it at the Academy of Music, and dined at Bade’s on Sixth Avenue.
By the 1920s its members’ funeral notices give Brooklyn addresses as well as Manhattan ones. In 1936 it entertained the Grand Master at the Hotel Astor.
As far as the sources show, City Lodge did not meet in Queens before its 1973 consolidation. It is the only lodge in the lineage that did not begin there.
Across the East River, the next lodge appeared on the waterfront.
Island City Lodge received its dispensation on June 18, 1865, and its charter on June 18, 1866. Its early members were raised at Hunters Point, where the lodge first worked.
The place was not yet a city. The waterfront settlements of what is now Long Island City, with their ferry slips, rail connections, and factories, still belonged to the Town of Newtown.
The city of Long Island City, incorporated in 1870, lasted until it was absorbed into Greater New York in 1898. The lodge’s name came first.
Its early members included a harbor master who also ran a livery stable, a blacksmith, and a merchant. Their trades fit a waterfront.
By 1906 the lodge was meeting in Smithsonian Hall at Vernon Avenue and Third Street.
That year it laid the cornerstone of a temple on Jackson Avenue, between Pearson and Anable Streets, on the block of the old City Hall, in what had been the civic center of Long Island City.
The ground floor was for stores, the lodge room was above, and the basement held a kitchen and a bowling alley.
A federal court building stood close by. In 1934 the court rented the ground floor, and in 1938 it took the whole building. The lodge went to Elmhurst.
The temple was not demolished. It later returned to commercial use.
Astoria’s Village Rooms and Grand Avenue Temple
Astoria’s first lodge was founded in a village.
In 1867 Astoria was a place on the East River that reached the world, in the words of the lodge’s own historian, by steamboats from Peck Slip and the Harlem River. They stopped at a dock near what that history called Jamaica Avenue.
The petitioners had joined lodges in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Hunters Point that were scattered and somewhat remote. The transit of the day made attending them a rare pleasure.
They met first, on February 22, 1867, in Odd Fellows’ Hall at 104 Main Street, over a shoe store near the Hallett family burying ground.
They then met at 93 Fulton Avenue and, from 1876, at 165 Fulton Avenue, above a tavern.
Fulton Avenue is now Astoria Boulevard. The corner of Main Street and Fulton Avenue is where Main Street meets Astoria Boulevard at the top of 22nd Street.
Astoria was part of the city of Long Island City from 1870 to 1898, and the Brooklyn papers kept dating stories about Astoria lodge events from Long Island City long after.
The lodge’s 1909 search for a site shows how the ground has changed.
In March of that year it turned down an option on Flushing Avenue at Fourth Avenue. Its own history notes that a temple there would have stood where the exit ramp of the Triborough Bridge approach reaches the street at Astoria Boulevard and 33rd Street. It would have been demolished when Astoria Boulevard was widened.
The lodge bought instead a lot on the south side of Grand Avenue, about a hundred feet east of Van Alst Avenue.
A 1923 newspaper description of the neighborhood gives that choice its context.
Along the street were dwellings thirty and forty years old, the temple, the home of the Exempt Firemen’s Association, and a Knights of Columbus clubhouse.
A Methodist church, an Episcopal church, and Our Lady of Mount Carmel were within a block.
The Grand Avenue elevated station was four blocks away. Trolleys ran along Vernon Avenue and Broadway and from the Queensboro Bridge. Van Alst Avenue, a hundred feet wide, was planned as the district’s backbone.
The lodge had chosen a lot in the old center of the village, and the village was turning into a neighborhood.
Two lodges grew out of Advance. Astoria Lodge No. 963 followed in 1919, and King David Lodge No. 994 was instituted after late 1921.
The Advance Masonic Temple, dedicated in 1916, remains the meeting place of the combined lodge.
Newtown Becomes Elmhurst
Newtown, in 1873, was a village.
It had a few thousand people in a county of about fifty thousand, one school, several shops, and five churches. Its Main Street area lay where Broadway now crosses Queens Boulevard.
It had no lodge. A Newtown Mason had to go to Jamaica, Flushing, Hunters Point, or Astoria, each many miles away by the lodge history’s reckoning.
Mizpah’s nine petitioners solved the problem locally.
The first meeting was held in the law offices of the first Master. Within weeks the lodge had the top floor of the Jebens Building on Broadway, which the Times later places opposite the Newtown Court House.
By 1900 the Times used Elmhurst as the post office name of the old village and described Mizpah as the only lodge in the old town of Newtown.
Its past masters came from Newtown, Maspeth, Corona, and Woodside. When the cornerstone of a public school in Woodside was laid, Mizpah’s officers filled most of the stations.
In 1905 the lodge moved to Arcanum Hall on Broadway.
In 1916 it bought a site for $6,000. In 1921 it dedicated a temple at Warner Avenue and Ketchum Place, as the newspapers of 1919 and 1920 called the corner.
Warner Avenue was soon renamed Whitney Avenue. The temple is 87-11 Whitney Avenue, a few doors from the Elmhurst Baptist Church, which a property record dates to 1917.
The temple’s location made it more than Mizpah’s.
The Masonic School of Instruction for the district’s lodge officers was founded there in 1928.
Island City moved in after the federal court took its building in 1938. In 1946 four lodges, Anchor of College Point, Geba of Elmhurst, King David of Astoria, and Service of Flushing, held a joint communication there.
Geba, proposed by Mizpah, began in rented rooms in Jackson Heights before moving to Elmhurst.
The neighborhood around the temple kept changing too.
In 1949 Fairyland, a children’s amusement park, opened on Horace Harding Boulevard. It later moved to Queens Boulevard at Woodhaven Boulevard, where a subway station was within a block.
In July 1954 Geba arranged an outing there for a hundred children from three children’s homes.
Fairyland closed in the late 1960s, and the Queens Center Mall opened on the site in 1973.
Mizpah’s temple was later sold to a church.
Flushing and the Service Branch
Flushing already had a lodge.
Cornucopia No. 563 appears in Mizpah’s centennial history as one of the lodges a Newtown Mason had to travel to in 1873. It built the Flushing Temple at 137-70 Northern Boulevard near Union Avenue.
Service Lodge was chartered on May 3, 1923, and met there.
The temple was Flushing’s Masonic address for the rest of Service’s independent life.
In November 1936 the First Queens District’s deputy visited the lodge there. In March 1956 Service held the homecoming of another deputy in the same building.
The district’s charity ball, held to support a free employment bureau in Jamaica, met at the Flushing Armory in 1936.
Service’s members were not all neighbors of the temple.
Max Rosenzweig lived in College Point, and a 1968 invitation sends replies to a Forest Hills address.
The lodge’s horizon was wider. In 1971 the First Queens District had seventeen lodges, and they planned to meet together in the ballroom of the Holiday Inn at LaGuardia Airport.
A Bayside lodge, No. 1150, was constituted in 1955 at the Bayside Masonic Temple at 35-25 Bell Boulevard. Its Master was a past master of Service.
The Routes That Led Back to Astoria
Read in order, the lodges’ beginnings suggest a broad movement from Manhattan into Queens.
Manhattan came first in 1856. Hunters Point followed under dispensation in 1865 and received its charter in 1866. Astoria’s charter followed in 1867, Newtown’s in 1873, Geba’s in 1919, and Service’s in 1923.
The sources say outright that the founders of Advance and Mizpah acted because the nearest existing lodges were too far away.
Geba was proposed by Mizpah. Nothing in hand explains Service’s founding.
The sequence suggests a lineage spreading beyond the western waterfront into other Queens communities. That is a reading of the locations and dates, not an explanation supplied by the sources.
The consolidations brought the branches back toward Astoria.
Island City left its own temple for Mizpah’s in 1938 and consolidated with Mizpah in 1987.
In 1993 the combined lodge joined Advance in Astoria, at the temple at 21-14 30th Avenue that Astoria’s first lodge had built.
In 2018 the combined lodge of Flushing, Manhattan, and Elmhurst joined it there.
The Merger History follows those consolidations. The Family Tree shows how the six branches connect.
The buildings fared differently.
Island City’s temple was taken over for federal court use and later returned to commercial use. Mizpah’s was sold to a church. Flushing’s belonged to Cornucopia.
Advance’s is the one the combined lodge still uses.
The meeting places can be followed in the series map.
City Lodge No. 408, chartered September 1, 1856, met in Florence Hall; Odd Fellows’ Hall at 165–171 Grand Street; 594 Broadway; the Bleecker Building; 33 Union Square; and the Ionic Room of the Masonic Temple from 1875.
Island City Lodge No. 586, working under dispensation from June 18, 1865, and chartered June 18, 1866, met at Hunters Point; Smithsonian Hall at Vernon Avenue and Third Street; its Jackson Avenue temple from 1907; and the Mizpah temple from 1938.
Advance Lodge No. 635, chartered July 2, 1867, met in Odd Fellows’ Hall at 104 Main Street; Mechanics Hall at 93 Fulton Avenue; 165 Fulton Avenue from 1876 to 1916; and its temple on Grand Avenue, now 30th Avenue, from 1916.
Mizpah Lodge No. 738, chartered June 20, 1873, met in a law office; the Jebens Building on Broadway; Arcanum Hall on Broadway from 1905; and its temple on Warner Avenue, now 87-11 Whitney Avenue, from 1921.
Geba Lodge No. 954, chartered May 7, 1919, met in rented rooms in Jackson Heights and then at the Mizpah temple in Elmhurst.
Service Lodge No. 1009, chartered May 3, 1923, met at the Flushing Temple at 137-70 Northern Boulevard.
Queens Masonic lodge geography comes down, finally, to a return trip. The lineage began in lower Manhattan, spread across Queens, and came together at an Astoria temple dedicated in 1916.
Sources and Notes
This article draws on the lodge, temple, and history pages in the series. Their Sources and Notes sections identify the underlying records used for each branch.
Newspapers
New York Times, December 9, 1871, funeral notice.
Times Union, March 11, 1923.
Brooklyn Daily Times, November 10, 1900.
Times Union, November 22, 1936.
Lodge Histories and Records
Henry Martin, “Historical Data of Advance Lodge No. 635,” 1915, and the Advance lodge history.
Mizpah Lodge centennial history, 1973.
City Lodge anniversary history and meeting-place records, as used in the City Lodge article.
Service Lodge bulletins.
Grand Lodge records for the charter and consolidation dates used in the series.
Property and Neighborhood Sources
Property record for 87-37 Whitney Avenue.
Queens Chronicle and Juniper Civic accounts of Fairyland.
[Before publication: complete the bibliographic details, identify the specific property and Grand Lodge records consulted, and confirm the present-use descriptions of the former temples.]
Note 1: Dates, Names, Places, and Interpretation
Island City’s dispensation of June 18, 1865, and its charter of June 18, 1866, are both correct. They mark different stages of the lodge’s formation. References to its place in the charter sequence use 1866.
The old hall at Main Street and Fulton Avenue was in Astoria, then part of Long Island City. Fulton Avenue is now Astoria Boulevard, and the corner of Main Street and Fulton Avenue is where Main Street meets Astoria Boulevard at the top of 22nd Street.
The reference to an Astoria steamboat landing near Jamaica Avenue follows the wording of the Advance history. The modern equivalent of that street reference is not established here.
City Lodge’s Odd Fellows’ Hall is given as the corner of Grand and Centre Streets in the notices and as 165–171 Grand Street in the lodge’s records.
City Lodge’s Clinton Rooms notice is treated in its lodge article as referring to the Masonic Temple in 1873. It is not used here as evidence that City Lodge occupied a Clinton Room at Odd Fellows’ Hall.
The “new Masonic Temple” of 1875 is identified as the Grand Lodge’s building at 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue from City Lodge’s anniversary history.
The Advance lodge history puts the rejected 1909 site at Flushing Avenue and Fourth Avenue. It says a temple there would later have stood at Astoria Boulevard and 33rd Street.
The 1871 funeral notice carries a garbled transcription of its lodge names. The identifications should be checked against the newspaper image before publication.
Mizpah’s temple stands at what newspapers called Warner Avenue in 1919 and 1920. Its address is now 87-11 Whitney Avenue.
The 1946 program misprints the Mizpah Temple’s address as 37-11 Whitney Avenue.
The Bayside lodge’s name appears as Cardozo in this draft’s source material and as Cardoza in the Service Lodge material. The body uses its number, 1150, pending confirmation of the spelling.
The Fairyland accounts differ on the year of the park’s move and its closing date. The Geba article gathers those differences in its Note 1. This page does not assign an exact year to the move and describes the outing’s participants without attempting to resolve every home’s location.
Descriptions of the former Island City and Mizpah temples’ later uses do not establish the dates or legal terms of their transfers. Present-use descriptions require confirmation before publication.
The suggested outward spread of the lodges and their later convergence in Astoria are interpretations of the places and dates. The sources do not establish a single transit-based explanation for all six lodges’ founding or for their consolidations.
The consolidations of 1973, 1982, 1987, and 1993 are given by year only.
Start Here · Series Hub · Timeline · Previous Article: To Be Assigned · Next Article: To Be Assigned · Related Directory: To Be Assigned · Related Member Profiles: To Be Assigned
Related Reading
Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586: A Living Inheritance of Six New York Lodges
The Merger History of Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586
A Map of the Lodges, Temples, and Meeting Places in the Advance Service Mizpah Lineage
Timeline of the Lodges That Formed Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586
Advance Lodge No. 635: Astoria’s First Masonic Lodge
How This Series Is Researched: Sources for Queens Lodge History
