Encounter with Kismet on a Ride Through Bed-Stuy

Cycling recently through Bed-Stuy I was startled to see two huge onion domes, one with a sag to its finial, rising above neighboring rooflines and I stopped to take some pictures of a remarkable building.

A banner on the front indicated it is the Friendship Baptist Church but the distinctive Moorish Revival architecture and details, including a scimitar over the doorway, made me wonder if it had been a masonic temple.

A search for the address revealed it was the Kismet Temple, purpose-built in 1910 for the Ancient Arabic Order of the Mystic Shrine, known as "Shriners," an order of the larger fraternity of Freemasons. The Shriners are devoted more to social amusements and philanthropy than the philosophical aspects of Freemasonry. The order is best known for its network of charitable Shriners Hospitals for Children in the US, Mexico and Canada. The building, described alternately as a temple or mosque, was designed by architect R. Thomas Short, himself a member of the Kismet Temple as well as numerous other masonic and Elk chapters and lodges. A search of our newsstand database reveals articles about fraternal organizations becoming frequent at the turn of the last century, with a heyday appearing just after WWI. I found several papers, including the Eagle, offering a regular feature page for “News of the fraternal organizations" or "Brooklyn fraternal organizations” starting in 1918 and continuing through the 1930s, ending abruptly in 1933. I was eager to delve into our photographs and see if I could find photos of the building from an earlier time; notable buildings in Brooklyn are often documented in the Center for Brooklyn History materials. But I was startled to find none of this remarkable structure. A search in our unpublished records yielded some interesting results. Every archive has some incomplete records: those with pictures and no information; or the reverse, a full record of information but no photograph. These await an archivist’s time to search for those missing items and complete the records, or for some eagle-eyed staff or patron to recognize a building, location or individual and identify the picture. Here I have had the satisfaction of doing both. I was lucky enough to find text records for this building, which led me to a folder where six missing photos are stored.

I digitized those historical images and with the recent photographs I took, we can now illustrate a 100-year span in the life of this elegant building. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHS), and I hope at some future time funds will be found to return it to its previous magnificence.

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.