Cobblestone House
35-34 Bell Boulevard | Bayside | built 1906
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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.
- 1905
Elizabeth A. Adams buys a Bellcourt lot for one dollar and plans a stone cottage
Adams, of Yonkers, paid the Bellcourt Land Company a single dollar for a 60-by-100-foot parcel at the northeast corner of Bell Avenue and Lamartine Avenue. The report says she was probably connected personally to someone in the deal. In November 1905 she announced plans for a stone cottage to serve as a private home, with an estimated cost of $10,000 and no architect named.
- 1906
A 2½-story house of rough cobblestones is finished in Bellcourt
Completed in 1906, the house blends Colonial Revival symmetry with an Arts and Crafts feel: three arched bays on front and rear, each topped by a pedimented window, deep recessed porches and a red tile roof. Its walls are made of tan and gray stones left uncut and set in concrete. The report suggests the stones may have been chosen to recall Bayside's farm past, when stone walls marked property lines.
“The walls consist of tan or gray stones that are neither cut, shaped, nor sized.”
- 1922
Adams sells the house, which becomes a boys' school and briefly a restaurant
Around 1922 Elizabeth Adams sold the property to Robert and Daisy Wayman Jr. Records do not show whether she or her family ever lived there, and a local story that the Broadway star Maude Adams stayed in the house has never been backed by documents. During the 1920s the building served as a private school for boys and, for a short time, as a restaurant.
- 2004
The cobblestone house and a Bellcourt gate pillar become a city landmark
The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the house after hearings in May 2004, when Council member Tony Avella and Queens Borough Historian Stanley Cogan backed it. The house had been divided into apartments in the early 1930s. Its landmark site also takes in the north pillar of the only surviving pair of cobblestone posts that the Bellcourt developers set up along Bell Avenue to mark the cross streets.
“Only the pair on the west side of the intersection at 36th Avenue survives and the north pillar is located within the landmark site.”
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