BAYSIDE — Seventh-grader Darien Bayersdorfer laughs when she recalls the ghost stories that she and her brother swapped about an ominous three-story building near their College Point home.
But a family trip to the historic Poppenhusen Institute recently changed the 12-year-old's outlook.
"I thought, 'Wow, this is so cool,'" she said of the post-Civil War landmark on 14th Road and 114th Street best known for housing the nation's first free kindergarten. "This cannot be knocked down, because that’d be a very big loss for the community."
Realizing that many students like Bayersdorfer do not know the history of their neighborhood, a new after-school program in Queens assigns research projects about local heritage to middle school students, hoping they will become the next generation of preservationists to spare the borough's landmarks from the wrecking ball.
The 14-week program for students at BELL Academy in Bayside encourages kids to investigate notable places they often pass or visit, and the intriguing lives of ancestors or relatives.
Organizers say the program, which runs into May and was funded through a grant from the city Department of Cultural Affairs, prods students who were born outside of the United States — a large number in the nation's most diverse county — to learn about their home borough.
If students discover local heritage, the thinking goes, they may eventually become advocates to correct what preservationists say is an unfair disparity between the number of official city landmarks in Queens and Manhattan.
"It's important to get everything to them when they’re young because that’s the stuff they remember," said Alexandria Dunne, a trustee at the Bayside Historical Society, which is partnering on the program with the BELL Academy.
As part of the program, the students will visit Bayside's most prominent landmark, a preserved Civil War fortress named Fort Totten. An urban planner will also speak to the group.
"They are going to be exposed to lots of things they've never seen before," said teacher Robin Russell, who is leading the course. "They’ll get excited."
While many of their classmates enjoyed the unseasonably warm weather on Friday afternoon, students in the program picked the people and places they will investigate.
Seventh-grader Anita Dong, 12, of Flushing, said she wondered what previously stood at the site where her parents now operate a Chinese-Japanese restaurant named Big Apple on Francis Lewis Boulevard and 33rd Avenue.
Others focused on the more distant past. Seventh-grader Matthew Kaye, 12, of Whitestone, said he wanted to trace his family's lineage back to one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Robert Livingston.
Embracing a similar topic, sixth-grader Yasmine Nemmassi said she will research the namesake of the elementary school from which she graduated, Francis Lewis. Like Livingston, Lewis also signed the Declaration of Independence. His Whitestone estate was burned by the British during the American Revolution, and only a flagpole with a fading plaque bears tribute to him at the site.
Nemmassi, 11, said the disappearance of historic sites prevents a community from knowing its past.
"It's like we're losing our own people," she said.
