Brotherhood Synagogue

The Society of Friends, generally known as the Quakers, bought four lots on the south side of the Park for $24,000; the historian Tom Miller dates the purchase to 1855. They hired Gamaliel King and John Kellum, a Brooklyn partnership with a Manhattan office on Broadway. King had built Brooklyn’s City Hall. The partners also designed the cast-iron Cary Building on Chambers Street, and Kellum would go on to A. T. Stewart’s great store on Broadway and the Tweed Courthouse. The meetinghouse, commissioned in 1856 and built between 1857 and 1859, was one of the partners’ last joint works; the firm dissolved the year it was finished. Apart from it, the Landmarks Commission later noted, their Manhattan output was stores and storefronts.

The architects gave the Friends an Anglo-Italianate building: a broad classical pediment, tall windows and a carefully measured facade. The Landmarks Commission’s designation report would later praise the discipline of its design, and quoted the retired editor of Architectural Forum, who thought Kellum had achieved “an aesthetic rarity for New York or any other city: not pretentious but direct, reticent, of good proportions, and superior to many a more ambitious effort then or now.” There is very little here that is simply showing off.

The Friends had been clear about that, and said so once the building was up. The meeting’s secretary reported that great care had been taken so that anyone who saw it would say it was “exactly suited for a Friends Meeting house: entirely plain, neat and chaste; of good proportions but avoiding all useless ornament.” Miller records a further instruction to the architects: no ornament “so as not to wound the feelings of the most sensitive among us.” A pediment was evidently useful. So were the generous windows. Even so, the synagogue’s history notes that the design was considered unusual for a Quaker house, being “less severe” than most. The building manages to be solemn without looking forbidding, an achievement easier to admire than to reproduce.

The synagogue’s architectural history describes a structure combining heavy timber with iron posts and beams, light brick behind a facade of Dorchester olive stone, a greenish-grey sandstone quarried in New Brunswick. Its large wooden entrance is sheltered by a curved pediment. The broad triangle above finishes the composition; the smaller curve below brings it down to the scale of a person arriving at the door. A 1964 newspaper account preserved the names of the men who built it: Daniel Cromwell, carpenter, whose interior woodwork survives, and Joseph Hillyard, mason, who gave the house stone walls two feet thick.

Brotherhood’s history says the Friends needed special permission to put a nonresidential building on the Park. Behind the gate, a small forecourt separates the house from the sidewalk. That pause before the entrance still distinguishes it from its neighbors.

The Friends had moved north through several Manhattan addresses. After the separation of 1828, the Orthodox meeting gathered for a time at Rutgers Medical College, then built on Henry Street. They sold that house to the synagogue Anshe Chesed in 1840 and put up a large brick meetinghouse on Orchard Street. In 1859, between Orchard Street and the Park, they borrowed the chapel of the Rutgers Female Institute on Fifth Avenue for a few months. The Landmarks Commission’s report on the Friends’ other surviving house, on Rutherford Place, records the sequence. This would not be the first Quaker building to become a synagogue.

Inside, two curving staircases with mahogany handrails rise to the main room. It is forty feet high, with a gallery carried on twelve iron columns and twelve tall, clear windows; it seats seven or eight hundred. Ada Louise Huxtable would later call it “a superb space, just one foot short of square and two generous stories high, scaled by tall, clear windows.” Over the speakers’ platform hung a sounding board, the curved canopy that helped carry a voice across the room. It is still there.

The wooden pews came from the Friends’ earlier meetinghouse on Orchard Street, built in 1840. They are older than the building. They were already used furniture when they arrived at this brand-new address, and the synagogue notes that the main-floor pews were made with an open space at the back to accommodate the bustles of women’s skirts.

From the sidewalk

From the sidewalk, look for the iron fence and forecourt, the curved pediment over the entrance answering the broad triangle above, and the slightly projecting end bays. The New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation’s plaque, installed in 1990, tells the story beside the door.

The Gramercy meeting belonged to the Orthodox branch of the Friends. The name describes a division within Quakerism; it has nothing to do with the Jewish congregation that would arrive much later. New York Friends had separated into Orthodox and Hicksite groups in 1828. For generations they maintained different meetings and properties, and for a century the two branches worshipped a few blocks apart, the Orthodox here and the Hicksites on Rutherford Place.

Quaker worship left little for a reporter to describe, which did not stop reporters. Tom Miller gathered several of their accounts. When the lawyer Richard H. Bowne was buried from here in May 1881, The Sun counted a dozen carriages behind the hearse, an oak coffin under black cloth with a floral sickle crossing a sheaf of wheat and no other flowers, and long intervals in which nobody spoke. An Episcopal clergyman from Fort Washington, where Bowne spent his summers, read from St. Paul. There was another silence. Then the Friends’ minister, Henry Dickenson, offered a prayer.

The room saw a reconciliation of its own long before the big one. Philadelphia’s Orthodox Friends had stopped writing to New York in 1846, after a quarrel over doctrine. In May 1897, with the yearly meeting gathered on 20th Street, a letter from Philadelphia arrived, the first in fifty years. The clerk, James Wood, asked whether it should be read. “I feel that God will that we should hear it,” said Ruth S. Murray, and voices around the room agreed. The assistant clerk read it out. Then the elders who remembered the old bitterness had their say, and after what The New York Times called a heated debate the meeting recorded its pleasure in the minutes and sent a copy to Philadelphia. Even making up could require careful paperwork.

By 1913 the Times could report a Quaker wedding here “with practically no trace of the old Quaker garb”: a red-striped canvas canopy from the door to the curb, guests in evening dress, and a single Quaker cap in the whole congregation, worn by Sarah Collins on the bench reserved for ministers. Time was, the reporter noted, when the three front rows would have been filled with Quaker gray.

Tom Miller also found a less formal resident in Meyer Berger’s “About New York” column of May 9, 1956: a large, dark-shelled tortoise that had “lived on and off the Square for years, though no one seems to know how many.” Gramercy ladies fed it moistened bread. In winter it holed up somewhere at the meetinghouse. Its reappearance from the hedges was the sexton’s sign that spring had arrived. No committee seems to have been required.

Reunion took longer. The two New York yearly meetings came together in 1955; local arrangements took more work, and the Quarterly Meeting’s files still hold the report of a 1957 committee “to discuss uniting the monthly meetings.” The Times, watching the talks in 1956, described the negotiators as “a patient, unhurried people, strangers to rashness and sudden impulse.” By then the two Manhattan meetings were already worshipping together, at 20th Street in the summer and at 15th Street when school was in session. They joined formally in 1958, and worship at the Gramercy meetinghouse came to an end. A religious reconciliation created a real-estate problem.

The Underground Railroad connection

Brotherhood’s own history identifies the building as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Its account of the meetinghouse says Friends sheltered people escaping slavery on the second floor and describes a surviving passage beneath the building as an escape route. It also records members’ work establishing trade schools for formerly enslaved people in the South.

The dates narrow the window. The meetinghouse opened in 1859, so any shelter given here belongs to the six years before emancipation, years shadowed by the Fugitive Slave Act and the city’s divided sympathies; in the Draft Riots of July 1863 a mob attacked the house of the Quaker abolitionist Abigail Hopper Gibbons on West 29th Street. The National Park Service’s history places Black communities and vigilance committees at the center of the wider network. Quaker assistance belonged within a much larger effort, sustained above all by people seeking their own freedom.

After 1958 the Friends kept the building and rented it out; for a time the Ninth Church of Christ, Scientist held services in the room. The Quarterly Meeting’s history records that on December 30, 1963, Theodore H. Friend wrote to Harry Helmsley, whose firm took charge of the sale. The Quarterly Meeting still has the letter, and with it a photograph of the house lettered “Meeting House for Sale.”

A large site on Gramercy Park did not have to advertise its possibilities. On March 29, 1965, the Times, as quoted by Miller, reported a sale of the 106-year-old building to a developer for $500,000. The buyer, the paper said, intended to build there. Huxtable later put the plan at a thirty-story apartment house, on an option granted in 1965. Geoffrey Platt, chairman of a Landmarks Preservation Commission that as yet had no law behind it, called the threatened loss “an example of the necessity for the landmarks legislation now pending.” Mayor Wagner signed that legislation on April 19. The landmark hearing report still distinguished the owner from the contract purchaser that September; the developer’s purchase had not closed.

The Commission held its first public hearing on September 21, 1965, a session that ran until eight at night, and the meetinghouse was on the calendar. The original landmark report makes unusually vivid reading. Fifteen witnesses supported protection. Representatives of the owner and the attorney for the contract purchaser opposed it. More than seventy-five letters and telegrams arrived in support, along with numerous telephone messages, and letters from the Deputy Borough President and the community planning board. The building was designated on October 26, 1965, five weeks after the hearing. It was among the earliest buildings protected under the new law.

Frank Gilbert, the Commission’s first secretary and later its executive director, remembered the hearing in his 2011 oral history. The commissioner beside him, J. Clarence Davies, a veteran of public hearings, leaned over and marveled at the wonderful, spontaneous expression of support. Gilbert pointed out the lawyer standing at the back of the Board of Estimate chamber who had obviously done a lot of hard work to prepare it. The enthusiasm was real; so was the preparation.

Protection did not immediately produce a permanent use. The developer’s deal came to nothing, and in 1969 the Friends sold the house to what the Commission described that year as “a civic-minded group of Gramercy Park residents,” for a community use. Gilbert credited Benjamin Sonnenberg, the public-relations pioneer who lived at No. 19, with leading the group. He also remembered that the transfer required signatures from people with an interest in the Park, and the difficulty of obtaining one from someone who was away. Even a rescue could be held up by one missing signature.

The residents’ plan was a performing-arts center. It fell through. The United Federation of Teachers then bought the building for offices and meetings, and in turn decided to sell. The building remained standing, and continued to deteriorate.

Irving J. Block was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1923, served in Panama with the Army during the war, studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and served with the Haganah in 1947 and 1948, and was ordained at Hebrew Union College in 1953. He was thirty-one when, on May 12, 1954, he and twenty-five men and women founded Congregation Beit Achim, the Brotherhood Synagogue. The congregation’s seventieth-anniversary account sets out five founding principles: a free pulpit, free pews, social service, community service, and “an active and innovative program of religious brotherhood.”

The first two were quite precise. The rabbi could speak according to conscience rather than present an official congregational opinion. A person’s place at worship, particularly on the High Holy Days, should not depend on buying a ticket. Block summarized the pulpit’s independence as speaking “to, and not for, the congregation.” He described his own position with equal candor: “I feel as though I am an Orthodox rabbi serving a Conservative congregation, most of whose members are Reform.”

The free pulpit was used. On Rosh Hashanah in 1971, days after Attica, Block called on the governor and the state’s correction commissioner to “don sack cloth and ashes” and lead New Yorkers in repentance for what had happened there.

For its first two decades, Brotherhood shared the Village Presbyterian Church on West 13th Street. Its minister, the Rev. Dr. Jesse W. Stitt, had led the church since 1939, and it was Stitt who encouraged Block to found a congregation under his roof. “We believe that our liaison represents the first time a church and synagogue have ever established a permanent relationship as brothers and partners,” he said. The congregations kept their own religious identities while working together in the arts and social action; together they sponsored the Greenwich Mews Theatre, an off-Broadway house with integrated casts that staged work by Black and Latino playwrights, Langston Hughes among them. The sign outside made the arrangement wonderfully plain: “One house serving two faiths.”

The congregation’s history treats this partnership as central to its founding purpose. Jewish worship and learning belonged alongside an active concern for people beyond the membership. The name Brotherhood described work the congregation intended to do.

The partnership did not survive the change in church leadership. Stitt retired in September 1971 and died that year. His successor, the Rev. William Glenesk, came from a Brooklyn church where he had made a name for unconventional services; The Villager later remembered him chiefly for officiating at Tiny Tim’s wedding on The Tonight Show. Relations deteriorated. During the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, Block posted a notice on the outdoor bulletin board: “May there be victory and peace for Israel.” The minister answered in the church bulletin with regrets “to our friends, Arabs, non-Zionist Jews and all others who are offended” by what he called an arrogant, self-righteous sign. The Anti-Defamation League later complained to the Presbytery that Glenesk had also called the ark, which had stood in the church for seventeen years, “a symbol of arrogant piety,” and had opposed the building of a sukkah. Brotherhood’s board voted that November to end the arrangement. Block, asked about his new neighbor, called him “abrasive and insulting” by comparison with his predecessor.

Brotherhood, then six hundred members strong, planned to leave with a Torah procession on March 19, 1974. Two Village congregations, Derech Amuna and Emunath Israel, offered temporary space without charge. Block said Brotherhood would contribute toward upkeep. There would be Friday-night worship in one location and Sabbath-morning services in the other, while classrooms and offices occupied rented quarters nearby.

The church did not long outlast the divorce. Its congregation disbanded in 1975, and in 1982 the building on West 13th Street became cooperative apartments.

Brotherhood needed space for worship, school and the ordinary business of a congregation. The old meetinghouse on Gramercy Park could accommodate all three.

Brotherhood found the meetinghouse in the summer of 1974. The purchase closed in 1975, and the congregation moved in that spring. In her June 15, 1975 account, “Recycling a Landmark for Today,” Huxtable put the price at $420,000, paid to the teachers’ union. Architect James Stewart Polshek, then dean of Columbia’s architecture school, and contractor Lawrence Held and Son worked without fees; by June 1975, the congregation had spent about $180,000 on restoration, and fundraising continued.

The structure was sound, but a bad roof and open joints in the masonry had let water in, and Huxtable found the interior “ankle-deep in fallen plaster and debris.” New plumbing, wiring and lighting were needed; windows required repair. Polshek chose pale blue walls with creamy-white trim, letting the room’s proportions carry the result. Huxtable called the outcome “the skillful recycling of an older structure for contemporary purposes with those delicate and difficult compromises that are essential to its continued life.” Of the room itself: “In art and amenity, it is beyond price.”

Money remained tight. Air conditioning could wait. Huxtable reported that construction workers came to the first Friday-night services.

The congregation’s reach was not confined to the Park. In October 1976, Block presented a Torah scroll, Brotherhood’s gift, to the American Association for Ethiopian Jews for the synagogue at Ambober, in Ethiopia. It was the first full-sized Hebrew Torah, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, to reach Ethiopia’s Jews, who had read their scripture in Ge’ez.

Fundraising continued. In 1976, artist and designer Ismar David created a silk-screen poster for an exhibition and sale benefiting the synagogue. The surviving flyer asks its reader to become a collector, then supplies a coupon. A handsome building still needed its bills paid.

This was the less photogenic part of preservation: a budget, donated professional time, repairs and repeated appeals. Without it, the victory of 1965 would have left Gramercy with an increasingly fragile building and no settled future. In 1990 the New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation put a plaque on the building, ending with the sentence the neighborhood had waited a quarter-century to read: purchased and restored.

The work continued after the initial restoration. The Sacred Space International guide records a 1987 renovation by a member of the congregation, M. Milton Glass, which added classrooms and nursery space and an interior elevator; the guide calls the elevator controversial, which suggests the arguments over how to treat the old room did not end in 1975.

In 1994, Brotherhood turned again to Ismar David, this time for the sanctuary. David was born in Breslau in 1910, spent twenty years in Jerusalem and came to New York in 1953; the Hebrew typeface that bears his name was released the following year. His career moved between lettering, books and architectural work, and the archive that preserves it dates the inauguration of the Brotherhood design to June 10, 1994.

The archive’s description of his scheme explains how it incorporated the old Quaker sounding board, the curved canopy intended to help carry a speaker’s voice. The ark forms part of a twenty-five-foot-high sanctuary installation, a focal point from the floor and from the gallery. Its wood marquetry introduced the Ten Commandments, the twelve tribes of Israel and a blessing in Hebrew and English; laser-cut veneers helped translate intricate drawings into wood. The cabinetwork was done in Ossining, by Timeless Wood Design and by Creative Designs, which executed the marquetry.

The design gave the room a clear Jewish focus while working with its spare architecture. The archive also records a loss: during a later renovation, much of David’s work was removed for safekeeping and inadvertently destroyed. The archive does not date that loss. In a building program documented separately by the congregation, between 1998 and 2003 the congregation converted the original Quaker attic into a library with classrooms and offices, moved its offices to the third floor, and renovated the sanctuary with new lighting and, at last, air conditioning. The sanctuary has its own history of alterations; the photograph here records it in 2014.

The gallery, its columns and the high windows still give the room its shape.

Brotherhood gives the old meetinghouse a busy week. Its egalitarian congregation follows the Conservative Jewish tradition, gathering for Shabbat and holidays, study and celebration. Children come to school, adults come to classes, and volunteers prepare meals for people who need them. The building earns its keep.

Rabbi Daniel Alder has led the congregation since Block’s retirement in 1994, having come to Brotherhood as a student rabbi and served as Block’s assistant. Cantor Isaac Yager joined in 2017. Block died in 2002; his memoir, A Rabbi and His Dream, appeared in 1999. Judge Laura Ward, a member since 1954 and the congregation’s first Bat Mitzvah, spoke at the seventieth-anniversary celebrations in 2024, which the congregation marked by commissioning a new Torah scroll, read for the first time in February 2025.

Prayer, music and learning

Friday-night and Saturday-morning services give the week its rhythm. Families with young children gather for Tot Shabbat, with stories and song. The community choir welcomes people with or without musical or Hebrew experience; its members sit among the worshippers, helping other worshippers learn the tunes. Concerts bring music into the sanctuary and courtyard, and children have a choir of their own.

Learning starts early. The Nursery School welcomes families from varied backgrounds into a program rooted in play, curiosity and Jewish life. The Hebrew School carries that education forward through study, worship and service. For children with different learning needs, the Tikvah program, established in the 1990s, offers adapted teaching in Hebrew, prayer, Jewish history and holidays. It charges no tuition.

Adults have Hebrew classes, lectures, film discussions and a Thursday Lunch & Learn centered on the weekly Torah reading. The program welcomes beginners as well as experienced students. Conversion classes make room for people beginning another kind of Jewish journey. The calendar also makes room for knitting, walks, mahjongg and canasta.

A warm room and a shared meal

The Brotherhood Homeless Shelter has been part of that life since the early 1980s; the congregation counts itself the first synagogue in New York to open one. On three evenings a week from January through March, volunteers prepare and serve dinner, sit and talk with guests, and pack breakfast and lunch for the following day. A warm place to sleep comes with company and a meal at a table. The synagogue’s volunteer page explains how to take part.

Its Social Action Committee also organizes food, clothing, book and blood drives. The annual Chuck Ginsburg Memorial Blood Drive gives neighbors another practical way to help. Brotherhood’s refugee and immigration committee, formed in 2018, arranges monthly dinners for asylum-seeker families with children in New York City public schools, along with packages of seasonal clothing, toys and games.

Other efforts extend beyond the building. Partnerships with organizations including City Harvest, New York Common Pantry, DOROT and Reading Partners connect members with food assistance, visits and tutoring. Interfaith programs and service projects carry forward the cooperation Block and Stitt began on West 13th Street.

For visitors, Brotherhood publishes information about services, group visits and accessibility. Shabbat services are open to the public; groups should arrange visits in advance. A ramp at the west entrance leads into the building, where an elevator serves the second-floor sanctuary. An induction loop assists worshippers using compatible hearing aids. Its current calendar is the best place to find the next class, concert or community gathering.

Brotherhood is one of the Park’s cherished, defining institutions. Generations of neighbors have known it through a child’s first school, a holiday service, a friendship, or a shift at the shelter. The building that Gramercy fought to save has given the neighborhood a great deal in return.