Island City Lodge No. 586 and the Temple That Served the City
Born in a ferry-house at the ragged edge of the Civil War, Island City Lodge No. 586 grew with Long Island City itself—from muddy waterfront beginnings to a dignified Jackson Avenue temple that would later serve as a courthouse, a cultural hall, and a civic landmark.
If you stand in Court Square today, the eye is pulled upward by civic stone, office towers, subway tracks, and the daily churn of Long Island City in motion. It is hard, standing there now, to imagine the place as it once was: low, muddy, uncertain, barely assembled. Yet one of the most revealing stories in Queens Masonic history begins precisely in that unfinished landscape.^1
It begins in 1865, in the final smoke of the Civil War, when a small group of Master Masons met in the old ferry-house at the foot of Borden Avenue and decided to form a lodge of their own.^2
That body became Island City Lodge No. 586.^3
Over time, the lodge would move from improvised meeting rooms to a purpose-built Masonic temple on Jackson Avenue.^4 That temple, in turn, would become more than a fraternal home. It would briefly serve the wider public as a cultural venue and even as a temporary courthouse.^5 The building is gone now. The lodge is not. And in many ways, the story of Island City Lodge is also the story of Long Island City itself: rough beginnings, civic ambition, adaptation, and endurance.^6
A Lodge Before There Was Really a City
Island City Lodge was born before Long Island City had fully become Long Island City.^7
In the spring of 1865, the villages and hamlets that would later help form the municipality—Hunter’s Point, Ravenswood, Astoria, Dutch Kills, Blissville, and others—were still separate places, connected more by ferries, trades, and rough geography than by unified civic identity.^8 Hunter’s Point, where the lodge movement began, was then a place of scattered houses, unpaved streets, dark nights, and working people.^9 The waterfront mattered. The railroad mattered. Industry was beginning to matter. But much of the civic and social infrastructure people now take for granted simply did not yet exist.^10
In that setting, a group of local Masons gathered and signed what the records call an “Affiliation Agreement,” pledging that once a charter could be obtained, they would leave their respective lodges and unite in a new one based in their own community.^11 They also agreed to bear the financial burden of a meeting place.^12 It was a practical act, but it also amounted to a declaration: that this rough edge of Queens deserved an institution of its own, ordered by ritual, memory, and mutual obligation.
Their dispensation was granted on June 18, 1865.^13 Their charter followed on June 18, 1866.^14 The new body was named Island City Lodge No. 586.^15
The Makeshift Years
The early years of Island City Lodge are among the most evocative in local Masonic history because they are so plainly human.^16
The brethren did not begin in a grand hall. They met where they could. First in the ferry-house. Then in offices. Then in a carpenter shop. Then in Smithsonian Hall.^17 Furniture was scarce. The records describe a world of improvised arrangements: planks laid across boxes to form seats, carpets needing to be shaken and later fastened down, requests for supplies that sound almost comic now but were entirely serious then.^18
This was not elegant Masonry in outward appearance. But it was earnest Masonry.
And even in those years of material struggle, the lodge gave relief beyond itself. The minutes show contributions to postwar suffering in Mississippi and even to the American colony at Jaffa.^19 Here is something worth pausing over: a young lodge on the industrial fringe of western Queens, still trying to establish its own footing, already looking outward in charity.^20 That instinct would remain one of its defining features.
Island City Lodge was not merely a room full of men trying to keep a meeting schedule. It was part of the moral assembly of a neighborhood just beginning to understand itself.
Building on Jackson Avenue
As Long Island City grew, so did the lodge. By the early twentieth century, after decades in borrowed and rented quarters, Island City Lodge was ready to build a permanent home.^21
That moment came in 1906.^22
On September 8 of that year, assisted by the officers of Grand Lodge, the brethren laid the cornerstone of a new Masonic Temple on the south side of Jackson Avenue, between Pearson and Annabel Streets, in what was then called the old City Hall block.^23 The date was especially fitting, as it coincided with the lodge’s fortieth anniversary.^24
Contemporary newspaper accounts noted the unusual simplicity of the ceremony.^25 Grand Master Townsend Scudder directed that all flashy display be minimized.^26 That simplicity only heightened its dignity. The day began in the old lodge rooms at Smithsonian Hall, after which the procession moved to the new site.^27 There, in proper Masonic form, the cornerstone was laid before a large assembly of brethren and visitors.^28
The temple that rose there was handsome, practical, and ambitious in exactly the way one would expect from a rising urban lodge.^29 Built of brick with a granite front, it stood three stories high.^30 The ground floor contained stores, the second floor offices, and the third floor the lodge room itself—large, modern, and properly appointed for Masonic work.^31 There were cloakrooms, anterooms, and even plans for a bowling alley in the basement.^32 The building cost about $35,000, a substantial investment and a statement of confidence in both the lodge and the neighborhood around it.^33
When the temple was completed and dedicated in 1907, Island City Lodge had entered a new phase.^34 It no longer borrowed stability. It possessed it.
More Than a Lodge Building
The most distinctive thing about the Jackson Avenue temple is not only that it served Island City Lodge so well. It is that the building’s usefulness extended well beyond the fraternity.^35
At one stage, the auditorium of the Masonic building was used for motion pictures and became the earliest home of the Idle Hour Theater before that operation moved into a dedicated theater across the street.^36 In other words, the temple briefly participated in the earliest age of public filmgoing in western Queens.^37 It was not just a lodge hall. It was also a cultural room in the broadest neighborhood sense.
Even more remarkably, the building later served as a temporary courthouse.^38
During the 1930s, the Queens County Courthouse underwent major expansion and reconstruction.^39 While that work was underway, court business needed a home. The Jackson Avenue Masonic Temple helped supply it.^40 For years, the building functioned as part of the civic machinery of Queens justice.^41
That is an extraordinary fact and one worth underlining. A structure built by Masons for their own ritual and fellowship became, in time, a public building in all but name. That transformation tells us something important about the relationship between fraternal institutions and the city around them. In the history of New York, lodges were often not isolated from civic life. They were stitched into it.^42
A building that began as a dream of local brotherhood became, for a time, part of the working body of Long Island City.
T
he Men Behind the Minutes
Like all good lodge histories, the story lives not only in buildings but in episodes.^43
One of the best-known involves a fraternal visit from Bayonne Lodge of New Jersey in the early 1880s.^44 After a degree and a banquet at Tony Miller’s Hotel, the brethren made their way back in darkness toward the tugboat.^45 There were no electric lights, and the edge of Vernon Avenue near Newtown Creek was unprotected.^46 The Master of Island City Lodge, William Dickson, fell into the freezing water and would likely have drowned if not for Alexander McGregor of the Bayonne delegation, who jumped in fully clothed and pulled him out.^47 The rescue cemented an enduring bond between the two lodges.^48
Then there are the family stories, which say as much about the lodge as any official report.^49 One member was raised by his father-in-law and later raised his own father.^50 On another evening, a father raised his son, a brother raised his brother, and a brother-in-law raised his brother-in-law.^51 In 1929, multiple officers each raised close relatives in a single communication.^52 The records also preserve the long devotion of men like Thomas H. Snedeker, who celebrated fifty years in the lodge and received the Grand Lodge medal for half a century of service.^53
What emerges from these moments is not just institutional history, but social history. Island City Lodge was a place where local men made continuity visible.
From Jackson Avenue to the Present
The Jackson Avenue temple did not survive indefinitely as a Masonic building.^54 In 1938, Island City Lodge began meeting at Mizpah Temple in Elmhurst, reflecting a long-standing fraternal relationship between the two lodges.^55 Eventually, that relationship became structural.
On February 12, 1987, Island City Lodge No. 586 and Mizpah Lodge No. 738 consolidated to form Island City Mizpah Lodge.^56 On May 10, 1993, that body consolidated with Advance Lodge No. 635 in Astoria to form Advance Island City Mizpah Lodge No. 586.^57 Then, on January 31, 2018, Service City Geba Lodge No. 1009 joined the line, creating today’s Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586.^58
This means Island City Lodge did not end. It moved through time the way New York institutions often do—by carrying memory forward through merger and adaptation rather than surrendering it.^59
Today, the brethren meet in Astoria, but the number 586 still carries the freight of Hunter’s Point, Jackson Avenue, Elmhurst, and the old civic life of Long Island City.^60
What the Temple Still Means
The old building is gone. Its site now lies within the broader government and courthouse landscape around Court Square.^61 The address has changed. The block has changed. The city has changed.
But the temple still matters because it helps explain what fraternal buildings once were in neighborhoods like this. They were not hidden rooms disconnected from urban life. They were staging grounds for memory, charity, ritual, sociability, and sometimes public service. They were places where communities rehearsed seriousness.^62
Island City Lodge No. 586 reminds us that Long Island City was not built only by railroads, factories, and developers. It was also built by men who gathered in rooms above ferries and shops, who insisted on order in unfinished places, who raised temples when the neighborhood was ready, and who left behind institutions strong enough to survive the loss of buildings themselves.^63
That is why the story remains worth telling.
Related Links
Next Article: Mizpah Lodge 738
