A Victorian-era residence, the kind that have long been displaced in Flushing by boring, monolithic apartments and blond brick two-family homes (you know the type…concrete driveways and prominent water meters) has been preserved as a museum.
One of the rare survivors, a small, two-story house at 149-19 38th Avenue painted pink and white, has not only been allowed to stand but has been restored to full Victorian-era glory.
It begins with its resident for 69 years, Betty Voelker-Orth, who was born in the house in 1926 and lived there until 1995, when she died from complications from an automobile accident. In her will, Mrs. Voelker-Orth, an English literature teacher, nature lover and birdwatcher, had left her house to the Queens Historical Society, the Queens Botanical Society and the Audubon Society with the proviso that it be converted into a museum, bird sanctuary and Victorian garden, a specific type of garden employing colorful tropical plants in season, along with ornamental elements such as urns, benches, gazebos and statuary. Mrs. Voelker-Orth left a good part of her fortune, which amounted to millions, to the prospective museum as well.
Completed in 2001, the Voelker-Orth Museum stands as both a testament to Flushing’s old Victorian history and as a small nature retreat. You may contact the museum at 718-359-6227. Though the museum is open for tours Sundays and Tuesdays from 1-4 PM, the back garden is amazingly open very liberally, Monday-Friday from 10 to 4, and Sundays during tour hours, 1 to 4. The tour is worth it because the interior has been preserved and looks like it did in the mid-20th Century.
A couple of blocks west, 38th Avenue takes a bend between two unnamed housing projects between 147th and 149th Streets. I had always thought that the bend appeared when the projects did. However, many years ago (I’ve been doing this awhile now) I was on a Flushing walking tour with the late Queens historian Jack Eichenbaum, who mentioned that the bend was there to get around a mansion. He probably said whose, but I forget.
You can do a lot of research with maps alone, though. I consulted this 1909 Queens map in Historic Map Works (which I try to evade nowadays, as they have made screen captures difficult by engineering an automatic zoom when I attempt it) but this edition by Bromley is invaluable). Before many Queens streets were numbered, they had names and while a healthy number of downtown Flushing’s streets have kept their old names, Lincoln Street was converted to 38th Avenue. You can see that it was interrupted by the estate of Robert E. Parsons. When the estate was divided into properties the mansion remained, but the city wanted to make Lincoln Street continuous; so, they simply bent it past the mansion, which still stood in 1940.
Parsons was a member of the family that originated one of Flushing’s first plant nurseries and for whom Parsons Boulevard was named.
Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013).