106 Powers Street, 1937.
Situated among attached vernacular residential buildings, this unassuming structure on Powers Street played a major role in the religious history of New York City. The simple peaked roof building was constructed in 1885 by architect O. H. Doolittle for a Methodist Episcopal Church. The Methodists vacated the building by the turn of the century and it was soon after occupied the Powers Street Gospel Mission Church. In 1913 the building became the clubhouse and assembly hall of the local Democratic party.
In 1931 the church and its parish house neighbor were sold to the American Mohammedan Society, and became the first mosque in New York City. While Muslims had worshiped in various informal venues in the city, this was the first long-surviving dedicated mosque. (Alexander Russell Webb, an early American Muslim convert had established a mosque on Broadway in 1895, but it was extremely short-lived.) Founded in 1907, Society was established by a group of Eastern European Muslim Tatars who settled in Williamsburg.
While various buildings around the city have switched from church to synagogue and visa versa, this was a new kind of religious conversion: from church to mosque. And while most later purpose-built mosques in the city follow a specific and particular architectural style (onion domes, minarets, and decorative tile), this church building would have looked like the perfect venue for the Muslim Tatars. In their homeland, they would have worshiped in simple wood-frame mosques. The society added a tiny wooden minaret on the roof and a crescent moon on the facade, and for the next half-century worshiped here as a tight-knit community.
In 1962, Joseph Mitchell, noted journalist and poetic explorer of New York's historic locales, wrote of the mosque, " It is a steep-roofed, clapboard-sided, two-story building with tall wooden doors and tall, colored-glass windows. Except for one appendage, it closely resembles a New England town hall."
The community that once worshiped here has dispersed; there is no longer a Tatar population in Williamsburg. Today the building houses the Brooklyn Moslem Mosque, which, though well kept, is largely unused except for religious festivals like Eid and Ramadan.
