Purchase and Renovation By First Roumanian-American
In 1902, the First Roumanian-American congregation/Congregation Shaarey Shamoyim purchased the Rivington Street building from the Church Extension and Missionary Society to satisfy a need for a larger building to serve the Lower East Side's rapidly growing Romanian-Jewish population. At the time, the property was valued at $95,000 (today $2.55 million). The funds for the purchase were raised from the members of the congregation, and to honor those contributing $10 or more, names were engraved on one of four marble slabs in the stairway to the main sanctuary. The most generous gift was $500, at a time when $10 was two weeks' pay. The congregation also took out two mortgages; one for $50,000 (today $1.34 million) with the Title Insurance Company, and a second for $30,000 (today $810,000) with the Church Extension and Missionary Society.
The congregation commissioned Charles E. Reid for extensive renovations, at a cost of $6,000 (today $161,000). The "eclectic Byzantine" remodeling involved converting it for Jewish use by removing Christian symbols and adding a Torah ark and bimah (central platform from which the Torah is read) at the sanctuary's north end. The renovations retained the original "horseshoe-shaped gallery supported by twelve Ionic columns" and wooden pews with reading shelves (likely from the 1889 Cady renovation), but a number of structural changes were made. Steel beams were added to support the weight of the ark and bimah, the rear wall was re-built and the gallery extended to meet it, two skylights were added (a concave stained glass one and a clear glass one over the ark), and at the front of the building, on top of the shallow (14 feet deep) fourth-story attic, an equally shallow fifth-story attic was added.
The completed structure filled almost the entire width of its approximately 70-foot-wide (21 m) by 100-foot-deep (30 m) lot, and seated 1,600 to 1,800. Dedicated in late December 1902, it was the Lower East Side's largest synagogue and only Romanesque one, and it became an "architectural and public showpiece".
Read more about this topic: First Roumanian-American Congregation
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