Congregation Shearith Israel, founded in 1654 and the oldest Jewish congregation in the country, in its fifth home: Arnold Brunner's 1897 temple front on Central Park West, four giant Corinthian columns over a flight of stone steps, the park across the avenue. Inside, the reader's desk faces the ark down the length of a Tiffany room of marble, brass and candle light, and off the lobby the Small Synagogue keeps the colonial furniture of 1730. The New Yorkers hang on boards on the pavement, in the lobby and down the corridor to the parsonage house.
Congregation Shearith Israel was established in 1654 in New Amsterdam by Jews who arrived from Dutch Brazil, and is the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States; it was the only Jewish congregation in New York City until 1825. It has worshipped in five buildings: on Mill Street in 1730 and again in 1818, at 60 Crosby Street in 1834, on 19th Street in 1860, and on West 70th Street at Central Park West since 1897. The present Neoclassical building was designed by Arnold Brunner, with interior design and stained glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany, and it was extensively refurbished in 1921.
Source · Congregation Shearith Israel, Wikipedia ↗
The Neoclassical front with four Corinthian columns, entablature and pediment on a flight of steps, Central Park West with its traffic and the park wall and trees opposite, the lobby, the sanctuary with the reader's desk and its four brass candlesticks facing the ark, the benches along the walls facing each other, the galleries on marble columns, the Tiffany windows, the brass candle chandeliers, the eternal light, and the Small Synagogue in the Georgian style. Mood: morning on the avenue, candles inside. 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.