The red brick house on Eastern Parkway with its three gables, built in 1920 as a doctor's office and bought by Chabad Lubavitch in 1940, now copied in dozens of cities round the world. Across the service road the Parkway malls run under the plane trees with their benches, and down the stair the great study hall is full: students learning in pairs at long tables, the tiered stands along the wall, the lamp lit before the ark. The New Yorkers stand on boards along the sidewalk and hang in the entrance hall and on the stair, never in the hall itself.
770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights was built in 1920 to a design by Edwin Kline in the Collegiate Gothic Revival style and was first a medical office. In 1940 Agudas Chasidei Chabad bought it for the Chabad Lubavitch movement as a home for Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn on his arrival in the United States, and through the 1940s it became the movement's centre: synagogue, yeshiva and offices. The main synagogue is underground, mostly beneath 784 and 788 Eastern Parkway; the first annex was added in 1960, with expansions in the late 1960s and mid 1970s. It serves as a place of daily prayer, a study hall and the hall for farbrengens, and the yeshiva has approximately 1,000 students. Over 55 buildings round the world copy it, mainly its three gables; the first was built in Kfar Chabad, Israel, in 1986.
Source · 770 Eastern Parkway, Wikipedia ↗
The three storey Gothic Revival front of 1920 by Edwin Kline in red brick with stone trim and three gables, the stoop and the pointed arch door, the low building next door over the synagogue, Eastern Parkway by Olmsted and Vaux with its service road, malls, benches and plane trees, the stair down to the study hall with its long tables and benches, the tiered stands, the bimah, the ark and the eternal light, and the shelves of books. Mood: afternoon on the parkway, the hall below full. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.