53rd (now 101st) Precinct Police Station
16-12 Mott Avenue | Far Rockaway | built 1931
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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.
- 1927
A deputy police commissioner starts the steam shovel to break ground for the new station house
By September 1927 the Board of Estimate had approved $250,000 for the station and bids were being taken; at the formal groundbreaking that followed, Deputy Commissioner John E. Leach set the steam shovel digging the foundation. Leach said that putting the force in motor vehicles had multiplied police coverage of Far Rockaway fourfold, and Richard M. Gipson of the Rockaways Chamber of Commerce welcomed the project.
“Deputy Commissioner John E. Leach starting the steam shovel that would dig the building's foundation.”
- 1927
Thomas E. O'Brien, a patrolman turned police architect, designs the 53rd Precinct station
Thomas E. O'Brien, born in 1860 to Irish immigrant parents, joined the police as a patrolman in 1890 and took night classes in architecture at Cooper Union. Encouraged by Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the Police Board, to prove his skills, he became the department's architect and in 1923 its Superintendent of Buildings. By September 1927 the city's Art Commission had approved his renderings for this station. He kept the superintendent's post until his death in 1932.
- 1929
The state prisons commissioner who condemned the old station hails its replacement
The Rockaways Chamber of Commerce held a daylong festival in August 1929 to mark recent improvements, among them a new high school, a boardwalk section and this police station, the first the City of New York had built in the Rockaways. John S. Kennedy, who had called the earlier wooden station one of the worst he had seen, now praised it as among the finest police buildings in the city.
- 1975
Hundreds of residents rally to keep the precinct house open during the fiscal crisis
In 1975, as New York City faced its fiscal crisis, local politicians and hundreds of Far Rockaway residents rallied to stop the station from being closed. The building has continued to serve as the neighborhood's precinct house since it opened in the late 1920s; in 1968 Mayor John V. Lindsay had come to inspect its new community room.
“…in 1975, local politicians and hundreds of residents rallied to save it from closure during the city's fiscal crisis.”
- 1986
101st Precinct officer Scott A. Gadell dies in a gun battle, and the street beside the station is renamed for him
In 1986 Scott A. Gadell, an officer assigned to this precinct, died in a gun battle near the corner of Seagirt Boulevard and Beach 31st Street. Mott Place, the street along the station's west side, was later renamed Scott A. Gadell Place in his memory, and the building's second main facade now faces it.
Nearby
- Far Rockaway Post Office18-36 Mott Avenue | 2 entries
- Firehouse, Engine Companies 264 & 328/Ladder Company 13416-19 Central Avenue | 5 entries
- The White Shul (Congregation Kneseth Israel)728 Empire Avenue | 2 entries