By Brete Murphy · November 10, 2026
Tadmor’s institutional history follows one charter rather than a succession of consolidations. Its meeting places lead from borrowed space in Woodhaven and Jamaica to two Ridgewood buildings, a Forest Hills hall and a continuing home in Astoria.
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Many of the seven current Queens District lodges combine the histories of earlier institutions.
Tadmor Lodge No. 923 follows a different pattern.
In the record assembled for this project, it has continued under its own name and number without consolidation. Like Cornucopia, it offers a history in which continuity does not depend on absorbing other lodge charters.
Its most revealing sequence is therefore not a succession of names.
It is a succession of places.
Tadmor began its work in borrowed space, obtained rooms in Ridgewood, acquired that building, built a larger temple and later moved again.
It now meets in the Advance Masonic Temple in Astoria, according to the author’s confirmation.
The addresses do not explain every decision. They provide a route through the lodge’s relationship with its neighborhood and with other institutions.
A Ridgewood Lodge Begins Elsewhere
Tadmor’s 1946 anniversary history states that thirty-one Masons signed a petition for a lodge on June 9, 1914.
The same retrospective places its institution under dispensation at Hillside’s temple in Woodhaven on August 26.
The lodge’s constitution followed in June 1915 at the Masonic temple in Jamaica.
The two occasions should not be treated as identical stages.
The dispensation authorized the new lodge to work. The later constitution followed its charter.
Nor should either ceremonial venue automatically be described as a long-term meeting address without additional records.
What the sequence does establish is that a lodge organized for Ridgewood used established Masonic space elsewhere during its beginnings.
Before it had a building of its own, it had access to other lodges’ rooms.[1]
Read The Engineer’s Room: Hillside, Advance and Tadmor →
Read Jamaica Lodge’s Rooms and Union Avenue Hall →
A Home at Halleck Avenue
By August 1915, newspaper references placed Tadmor at 144 Halleck Avenue, at Fresh Pond Road.
The author’s research dates its purchase of the building to 1918.
That changed the relationship between lodge and premises. Tadmor was no longer simply using space made available for its organization or ceremonies.
It had acquired a home.
The newspaper account from early 1920 reported more than 350 members and 150 applicants. It also described efforts to reduce a twenty-thousand-dollar debt.
Those figures require their own distinctions.
Applicants were not yet members. The debt was an obligation reported at a particular date, not a complete account of the building’s financing.
The bazaars supplied a public-facing part of the work. Shop-window displays, prizes and a week of activity brought the project beyond the stated meeting.
The lodge was sustaining a property as well as conducting its ceremonies.[1]
A Second Lodge and a Larger Temple
In 1922, members of Tadmor helped organize Granite Lodge No. 1011.
Granite used Tadmor’s building.
That relationship did not divide Tadmor’s warrant or automatically place Granite’s later institutional history inside Tadmor’s own.
It established another lodge, connected through its founders and meeting place.
A larger building followed for Tadmor.
The cornerstone of its new temple at Forest Avenue and Summerfield Street was laid in September 1925. The building opened for use in 1926.
Contemporary coverage described an exceptionally large lodge room and substantial gatherings.
Claims that it was the largest room of its kind in Brooklyn or Queens belong to those reports. The present research does not establish a measured ranking.
The change in scale is evident without the superlative.
A lodge that had begun with access to other institutions’ rooms now possessed a building capable of accommodating major events beyond its own ordinary meetings.[1]
Ridgewood Becomes a Gathering Place
On May 19, 1928, Tadmor’s temple hosted the constitution of Suburban Lodge No. 1087, Maspeth Lodge No. 1089 and Rufus King Lodge No. 1091.
Grand Master John A. Dutton conducted the occasion, assisted by district officers including Charles W. Froessel.
The newspaper accounts described a large Queens gathering.
The three new lodges later entered different surviving lines.
Suburban’s history continues within Springfield Gardens. Maspeth and Rufus King belong to the history of Harmony.
Wakefield’s constitution took place in Tadmor’s room in June 1931, according to Wakefield’s anniversary history. Its later institutional line entered Anchor-Astoria.
These ceremonies make the Summerfield Street building more than a chapter in Tadmor’s property history.
They connect it with the beginnings of institutions now represented elsewhere in the Queens District.[2]
Read Charles W. Froessel: From Tadmor’s East to the Grand East →
The People Who Made the Connections
Two Tadmor members recur across this wider network.
Its first Master, Edward J. Smith, participated in other lodges’ early ceremonies. The record places him with the Tadmor delegation associated with Geba’s institution, presenting Astoria’s dispensation and performing duties at Wakefield’s institution and constitution.
Froessel served as Tadmor’s Master in 1926, later became Grand Master of New York and served on the Court of Appeals.
Their careers do not establish that Tadmor directed the organization of every lodge they assisted.
They show how members carried responsibilities beyond their own institution.
The building and the officers supplied different kinds of connection: a place for a ceremony and people authorized to perform particular duties.
Read Edward J. Smith: Mr. Mason of Queens →
A Second Map in the Member Notices
The member notices supply another geography.
The author’s packet includes earlier addresses in Ridgewood, Glendale, Middle Village and Queens Village.
Later notices identify members in Rockville Centre, Oyster Bay, Williston Park and Lindenhurst, followed by examples farther away in Florida, upstate New York and Georgia.
Those notices establish individual connections.
They do not show that every member moved, that all retained membership continuously or that the selected cases represent the whole roll.
Some funeral notices demonstrate that the lodge’s relationship with a member could continue after that person lived elsewhere.
The meeting address and the membership addresses were not necessarily the same map.
That is the strongest conclusion the evidence presently supports.
A fuller account of suburban movement would require membership records over time, not simply an accumulation of obituaries.[1]
Selling and Meeting Elsewhere
A 1988 notice still identified the Summerfield Street building as the Tadmor Masonic Temple.
By June 2011, newspaper coverage reported that the lodge had sold the property and was meeting in an American Legion hall in Forest Hills.
That report gave its membership as about sixty.
The figure describes the lodge at the time of the article. It should not be compared mechanically with an earlier reported total without checking how each count was made.
The sale date remains unresolved in the research supplied here.
So does the date when Tadmor ceased meeting in the building.
Property transfer and departure may coincide, but one should not stand in for the other without a record.
The reported later uses of both Ridgewood properties—the larger temple as a youth center and the Halleck Avenue building as a restaurant—also require dated references before being treated as current descriptions.
The established sequence is narrower: Tadmor moved from its own Ridgewood property to rented or shared space elsewhere.[1]
Astoria and an Earlier Plan
Tadmor now meets at the Advance Masonic Temple at 21-14 30th Avenue.
The author confirms a long-standing arrangement, but the precise arrival year remains to be established.
The building also accommodates Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586 and Parthenon Lodge No. 1101 under the author’s November 2026 account.
The room introduces a connection to Tadmor’s beginning.
Advance’s records state that Arthur E. Wenige’s firm supplied the same lodge-room blueprints previously used at Hillside in Woodhaven.
Tadmor’s later history places its 1914 institution in Hillside’s temple.
These two accounts link the buildings through a plan.
They do not establish that the present Astoria room is an unchanged duplicate of the original Woodhaven interior.
The connection remains meaningful without claiming an exact architectural return.
Tadmor began in one building associated with the plan and now works in the other.[3]
Granite’s Separate Road
Granite’s later history followed another line.
The author’s Anchor-Astoria research identifies its consolidation with Cathedral in 1976 and the combined body’s participation in the formation of Queensboro in 1986.
Queensboro later joined Anchor-Astoria in 2024.
That sequence belongs to Granite’s institutional continuation.
Tadmor remained separate.
The distinction prevents the family metaphor from becoming misleading. Members helping establish another lodge did not create a branch of Tadmor’s own charter that later had to return.
They created another institution whose subsequent decisions led elsewhere.
Tadmor’s continuing home is in Astoria. Granite’s later history belongs within the Anchor-Astoria line in College Point.
Their common beginning remains part of both stories.[2]
Read Anchor-Astoria Lodge No. 729 →
What One Charter Can Show
Tadmor’s history offers a useful counterpoint to the combined lineages elsewhere in this series.
An institution can retain its name and number while changing its relationship with property, neighborhood and neighboring lodges.
Borrowed ceremonial space became an acquired building. That building was followed by a larger temple. A later period brought other meeting arrangements.
The record also shows relationships extending beyond Tadmor: Granite’s organization, the three-lodge constitution, Wakefield’s ceremony and members serving across lodge lines.
The reasons for remaining independent have not yet been established.
It would be too strong to call Tadmor a lodge that refused to merge and therefore had to move.
The evidence supports two facts that should remain separate: it continued independently, and its meeting places changed.
Those changes give its lineage essay a different shape.
The continuity lies in the institution, not in possession of one address.
The Room It Uses Now
Tadmor’s present meeting room belongs to another temple’s history.
That does not make it an incidental setting.
The Astoria arrangement places the lodge within a shared building and connects it with another documented episode of cooperation: the firm supplying plans to Advance.
The addresses have changed since 1914.
The practical question is recognizable.
Where can the lodge conduct its work?
Tadmor’s answer has moved through several rooms without requiring a new name.
Endnotes
1. Tadmor’s Institutional and Meeting-Place History
The author’s Tadmor article and assembled newspaper packet, including:
- Ridgewood Times, June 14, 1946.
- Brooklyn Daily Times, June 21 and August 21, 1915.
- Brooklyn Times Union, January 18, 1920.
- Brooklyn Times Union, September 25, 1925.
- Brooklyn Eagle, November 30, 1926.
- Member notices, 1928–2009.
- Daily News, April 27, 1988.
- Daily News, June 28, 2011.
The 1946 retrospective supplies the petition and Hillside institution account.
The earlier newspaper references establish stages in the lodge’s Ridgewood history, reported membership figures, building activity and later meeting arrangements.
The member notices are individual examples, not a complete residential analysis.
Exact sale dates for both Ridgewood properties remain unresolved.
Direct clipping URLs were not supplied.
2. Ceremonies and Granite’s Later Line
Brooklyn Eagle and Brooklyn Daily Times, May 1928.
Support the constitution of Suburban, Maspeth and Rufus King at Tadmor’s temple.
Wakefield Lodge No. 1110, tenth-anniversary history, 1940.
Supplies the June 1931 constitution account.
The author’s Anchor-Astoria research, Article 4, supplies Granite’s later consolidation sequence.
Exact formal names and dates should follow the controlling Grand Lodge records in the respective institutional histories.
3. Astoria and the Shared-Plan Account
Brete Murphy, November 2026 confirmation.
Establishes Tadmor’s present meeting place and the supplied lodge occupants of Advance’s temple.
Advance Lodge records, as examined and summarized by the author, supply the account of lodge-room blueprints previously used at Hillside.
See The Engineer’s Room.
The original plans have not been supplied for comparison.
Tadmor’s arrival year remains open.
4. Scope and Interpretation
This essay follows Tadmor as one of the seven current Queens District lodges.
It does not claim that Tadmor is the only unmerged lodge in the group.
The supplied record also treats Cornucopia as continuing without absorbing other lodge charters.
The essay does not infer a refusal to consolidate from Tadmor’s continued independence.
It does not treat selected member notices as proof of a uniform migration or a complete explanation of property decisions.
Ceremonial venues, regular meeting places and owned buildings are distinguished.
Questions for Further Research
- When did Tadmor sell the Summerfield Street temple?
- When did it stop meeting there?
- Who purchased it, and what do the deed records establish?
- When was the Halleck Avenue property sold?
- When did Tadmor move from Forest Hills to Astoria?
- Do minutes record discussions of consolidation?
- What do membership returns show by decade?
- What sources establish the buildings’ later uses?
- Which photographs and plans document each stage of occupancy?
Continue Through the Tadmor Series
- Tadmor Lodge No. 923: Institutional History
- Edward J. Smith: Mr. Mason of Queens
- Charles W. Froessel: From Tadmor’s East to the Grand East
Follow the Connections
- The Engineer’s Room: Hillside, Advance and Tadmor
- Anchor-Astoria: Granite’s Later Institutional Line
- Harmony: The Maspeth and Rufus King Connections
- Springfield Gardens: The Suburban Connection
- Connecting Stories Across the Queens District’s Seven Lodges
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