Inside the doors of the tall Neo-Classical house on West 86th Street that members call the first shul with a pool: New Yorkers on the lobby walls, a grand stair rising straight ahead to the sanctuary, whose eternal light you can see from the door, and a stair on the right going down to the pool, where the lanes are never empty. The social hall opens on the left.
The Jewish Center, a Modern Orthodox synagogue at 131 West 86th Street on the Upper West Side, was founded in 1918 by Jews moving into a neighbourhood then just being built along the new IRT subway line. Its first rabbi was Mordecai Kaplan. The tall Neo-Classical building holds social halls, classrooms, auditoriums and offices besides the main sanctuary, and it was the first synagogue in America built as a cultural, social and recreational home as well as a spiritual one: its members call it the first shul with a pool.
Source · Jewish Center (Manhattan), Wikipedia ↗
The tall front on West 86th Street with its limestone base, columns and three arched windows under brick storeys, the lobby, the grand stair to the sanctuary foyer, the sanctuary with its women's gallery, coffered ceiling and laylight, the ark and the eternal light, the social hall with its stage, and the swimming pool downstairs with swimmers in the lanes. Mood: shul, school and swimming pool in one tall house. 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.