Club Forty
Clipping describing 40-22 Lawrence St. as the address of the New York and Queens Electric Light and Power Company, Long Island Sunday Press, 13 March 1938. 
Clipping describing the same address as an Army Air Corps surplus depot, Long Island Star-Journal, 27 February 1946. 
Lumber Mill at the intersection of what is now College Point Blvd. and Northern Blvd. (Via WPA Photographs, 1939-1941). Known Name(s)
Club Forty
Address
40 Lawrence St., Flushing Queens, NY
Establishment Type(s)
Road House
Physical Status
Unknown
Description
As of April 2025, this author was unable to locate the original location of the building given the outdated address format. It is possible that the establishment once stood at the intersection of 40th Road and Lawrence Street (now the James A. Bland housing project) or at the intersection of Lawrence Street and Broadway (now College Point Blvd. and Northern Blvd.). Both locations have been the site of major urban renewal across the years since Club Forty’s listing in the Green Book.
Detailed History
While the exact location of the building that housed the Club Forty is unknown, the vicinity of Lawrence Street as it ran along Flushing Creek was largely industrial in the late 1940’s and remains so today. At the 40 block of Lawrence Street sat an early power generating station that later became an Air Force depot. A lumber yard sat at the intersection of Broadway and Lawrence in the early forties as well. Club Forty would thus have served the working-class, blue-collar residents of the area. The nature of the area also made it among the earliest to face urban renewal after the Second World War. Large portions of the 40 block of Lawrence were demolished in the early 1950s to make way for the James A. Bland Houses, and Lawrence and Broadway were both widened and renamed in the late 1960s to College Point and Northern (https://www.qchron.com/qboro/i_have_often_walked/when-lawrence-st-was-lo...).
