First Presbyterian Church of Newtown Elmhurst, New York

Text courtesy of the National Register of Historic Places, a program of the National Parks Service. Minor transcription errors or changes in formatting may have occurred; please see the Nomination Form PDF for official text. Some information may have become outdated since the property was nominated for the Register.

The First Presbyterian Church of Newtown is significant under National Register criteria A and C in the areas of Architecture and Social History. Completed in 1895, the church sanctuary was designed by Queens architect Frank A. Collins to fulfill the wish of the buildings donor that it be modeled on an 1873 church in Cherry Valley, New York. The imposing edifice is significant as an example of high Victorian Gothic Revival style ecclesiastic architecture executed in granite and sandstone located in the Queens neighborhood of Elmhurst. The church houses windows by noted New York City stained-glass artists Sellers & Ashley, practitioners of the opalescent style popular in the late 19th century and associated with Tiffany Studios, for whom both Benjamin Sellers and William J. Ashley also worked. The building is a rare example of a church designed by Frank A. Collins, whose career as the New York City Department of Educations deputy superintendent of buildings for Queens is credited with overseeing the construction of some fifty school buildings in the borough, and it is also one of his largest private commissions.