THE HISTORY OF ST.
SEBASTIAN PARISH:
1894 - 1994
The Situation
in 1894
The year was 1894. It was the year Thomas
Edison opened America's first cinema, the Kinetoscope,
in New York. War broke out between China and Japan.
In France, Capt. Alfred Dreyfuss was convicted on a
false treason charge. "Coxey's Army" of the unem-
ployed marched on Washington. President Grover Cleve-
land was halfway through the second of his two disconti-
nuous terms as President of the United States. It was two
years after the quadricentennial of Columbus' discovery
of America. Major league baseball was rapidly establi-
shing itself as the "national pastime" with the current
National League champion, Baltimore, beating out the
teams from Brooklyn, New York, and Boston. The City
of Greater New York did not yet exist, awaiting its crea-
tion in 1898 by the merger of the cities of New York,
Brooklyn, and Long Island City, the county of Rich-
mond, and the towns of Flatbush, New Utrecht, and
Gravesend in Kings County and Flushing, Jamaica,
Newtown, and the part of the town of Hempstead known
as Rockaway in Queens County. And in May of that
year, Bishop Charles McDonnell, the second bishop of
Brooklyn, established our parish, the second of the
Queens parishes he founded. We take for granted the
existence of our parish as it is now. But Woodside,
Queens, and the Catholic Church itself were very differ-
ent entities in the nineteenth century and earlier. We
need to look at history to understand better how we got
here.
