This house had survived the ages, after all, a fact that is always moving to me in a country where so many, if not most, old things have been paved over. ![]() I thought, C’mon, we all know now that anything in America perceived as a human rights victory happened at the expense of a thousand human rights violations. An aunt encouraged me to go to the Bowne House in Queens, just over the river-my birthright, my grandmother’s pride, think of her, all her cherished clippings. As I was leaving her apartment after the final filing session, she reminded me that I was eligible to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, which she was very proud to be able to pass down to me. I occasionally pulled out a comb to tease my bright pink hair. I pulled at the sweaty hem of my pegged Misfits T-shirt as I knelt by her filing cabinet. I did not spend much time that summer retaining my grandmother’s stories about the Bownes, absorbed instead by whatever plans I had for the evening: an Agnostic Front show at the Crystal Ballroom, The Escaped at the Paris Theater. She spent a lot of those afternoons telling me about the Bownes, a family from whom she was especially proud to descend: They’d produced New York City mayors, Yankee abolitionists, suffragists, and above all, John Bowne, whose single act created, as the story went, precedent for the protection of religious liberty that would one day end up in the Bill of Rights. The summer I was fourteen, my grandmother hired me for ten dollars an hour to help file all of her genealogical research, which she had been carrying out at no one’s behest for three decades. For instance, there is some evidence that John Bowne might have owned slaves. And like all historical interpretive sites, there are gaps and omissions. ![]() The house is now considered, at least by some historians and certainly by the Flushing Chamber of Commerce, to be the birthplace of American religious freedom. When Bowne refused to desist or pay a fine for hosting the Quakers, he was arrested and banished to Holland, where he then carried out a letter-writing campaign and appealed before the Dutch East India Co., who upheld his arguments for freedom from religious persecution, expunged his record, and returned Bowne to his family, in his little house, whereby the governor was ordered to lay off. Peter Stuyvesant, the totalitarian governor of New Netherland, had banned the observance of all religions other than the Dutch Reformed Church. In the heart of Flushing, Queens is a saltbox-style Dutch farmhouse preserved from the mid-seventeenth century, where John Bowne, an English farmer and merchant, performed a famous act of civil disobedience: He allowed Quakers to worship in his kitchen. This is Then & Now, a monthly column by Adrian Shirk on the history of buildings in New York.
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