The 1887 front of the Eldridge Street Synagogue on a Lower East Side street of tenements, with its horseshoe arches, twin towers and rose window. Go in by the museum doors in the towers: the New Yorkers hang on the lower level, and a stair climbs from there into the restored sanctuary, where gold stars cover the blue vaults, brass chandeliers hang over the pews and the round east window of 2010 glows above the ark.
The Eldridge Street Synagogue opened in 1887 at 12 Eldridge Street, the first synagogue in America purpose built by immigrants from Eastern Europe. After the 1924 immigration quotas the congregation shrank, moved into the lower chapel in the 1940s and left the main sanctuary to decay. It was rediscovered in 1986, named a National Historic Landmark in 1996, and restored by December 2007. A stained glass window by Kiki Smith and Deborah Gans was added in 2010.
Source · Museum at Eldridge Street ↗
The Moorish Revival front by Peter and Francis William Herter with its horseshoe arches, towers and rose window of twelve roundels, the Museum at Eldridge Street on the lower level, the sanctuary with its women's gallery on columns, painted stars on blue vaults, brass chandeliers, the central bimah and the carved walnut ark, the ner tamid, and the 2010 east window by Kiki Smith and Deborah Gans. Mood: painted stars, a window of blue glass. 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.