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THE PROTECTIVE mantle of New York City landmark status was no match for the ferocity of Mother Nature two weeks ago, when a torrential rainfall claimed the roof of historic St. Monica's Church.
Fate had been neither gentle nor kind, to begin with, to the battered, badly eroded 1850s Jamaica church, which was first closed by the Brooklyn Diocese in 1973 when the parish merged with another. The state took title to the building five years later, when it gained oversight of the York College campus, where the church is located.
In fact, a number of historians and others who advocate preservation of old buildings even wondered how the steel support structures, which the state installed to stabilize the facade two years ago, managed to keep the beleaguered Romanesque Revival building upright at all.
Then the rains came. And on the morning of May 11, officials at York College, where the old Catholic church is located at 94-43 160th St., reported that the roof had come down.
There are other Queens buildings with interesting histories - including the Derech Emunoh synagogue on the Rockaway peninsula and the New York State Pavilion in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park - whose eroding or embattled exteriors may or may not bespeak ultimately sad fates. And there are old residences in parts of College Point which, though not imperiled by either natural disaster or development plans, have troubled-enough exteriors to spark concern about their fate.
But as the rains took their toll this month on St. Monica's, it became immediately clear that the church building was about to face yet another confrontation with its own mortality - perhaps for the final time.
Years earlier, acknowledging that the school ought to try to use the bricked-up landmark - the oldest among the seven buildings on its campus - York officials had considered turning it into a visitors center or student building of some kind, said Winston Mayers, director of facilities.
The most recent plan, which won a $5-million...