Park East Synagogue, built in 1890 by Schneider and Herter: a Moorish Revival front of red brick and pale stone on East 67th Street, two unequal towers, striped arches over the doors and a rose window between them, with the Park East Day School next door letting out. Inside, galleries on slender columns run round a painted and gilded room lit through coloured glass. The New Yorkers hang on boards on the pavement, in the vestibule, and down the school corridor.
Park East Synagogue at 163 East 67th Street was founded in 1890 by Rabbi Bernard Drachman and Jonas Weil to promote Orthodox Judaism as an alternative to Reform, and its building was completed the same year to designs by Schneider and Herter. The style is Moorish Revival with Byzantine and Romanesque Revival elements: asymmetrical twin towers, the eastern one taller, each once topped by a bulbous dome since removed, and a prominent rose window. It was designated a New York City landmark on January 8, 1980 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places on August 18, 1983. In 2008 Pope Benedict XVI visited the synagogue, the only papal visit to a synagogue in the United States.
Source · Park East Synagogue, Wikipedia ↗
The Moorish Revival front with its asymmetrical towers, the eastern one taller, the striped horseshoe arches over three doors, the rose window, the red brick banded with stone, the domes long gone from the tower tops; inside, the galleries on painted columns and horseshoe arches, the blue and gold ceiling, stained glass, the central reader's platform, pews facing the ark, the eternal light; the Park East Day School next door and East 67th Street. Mood: afternoon, school letting out. 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.