Mann house, Free Synagogue of Flushing

136-23 Sanford Avenue | Willets Point | built 1931

Open on the map4 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1859

    Flushing merchant Robert B. Carter has a frame house with a mansard roof built at Sanford and Jamaica avenues

    The white house that now stands on the Sanford Avenue side of the Free Synagogue of Flushing's lot dates to 1859-60, when it was put up for Robert B. Carter, a Flushing merchant, on the corner of Sanford Avenue and Jamaica Avenue (now Kissena Boulevard). According to the congregation's history, it passed through several owners in the decades that followed, among them Mary M. Hoffman in 1870 and Harriet S. Mott Onderdonk in 1888.

    Source: freesynagogueflushing.org

  2. 1891

    Samuel Vernon Mann acquires the house and probably gives it its Colonial Revival portico

    In 1891 the old Carter house passed to Samuel Vernon Mann, a currency broker and collector of 18th-century furniture. According to the congregation's history, the Colonial Revival alterations, among them a gabled portico on giant fluted columns, were probably made during his ownership. It was still known as the Samuel Vernon Mann property when the congregation bought it in 1921.

    Source: freesynagogueflushing.org

  3. 1921

    The Free Synagogue of Flushing buys the Mann house and plans to worship on its first floor

    In 1921 the Free Synagogue of Flushing acquired the Mann property, which it called the white building. Its plan was to remodel the first floor of the old homestead into an auditorium seating at least 300 people, so that it could serve for a time as a house of worship.

    Source: freesynagogueflushing.org

  4. 1926

    The white house is moved to the Sanford Avenue side of the lot to clear room for a new sanctuary

    As membership grew, the congregation needed a bigger sanctuary than the old house could offer. In 1926 the white building was shifted to the lot's Sanford Avenue frontage, making way for a neoclassical synagogue by Maurice Courland with a portico of four Ionic columns. The congregation's history says the moved house was meant to hold offices and classrooms.

    Source: Wikipedia

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