From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Still Standing
The worshippers move out, the ceiling falls in. What to do?
A few weeks ago, the gorgeous 30-foot ceiling holding a magnificent chandelier over the main sanctuary of New York City's First Roumanian-American Congregation collapsed thunderously in dust and debris. No one was injured, but it's possible the 19th-century Romanesque building has been dealt a fatal blow.
Rabbi Schmuel Spiegel says otherwise. "We're not abandoning our synagogue. And we're not leaving Rivington Street," he insisted, referring to the synagogue's address in the heart of the Lower East Side, surely the most famous Jewish neighborhood in the U.S. Like many of New York City's 3,000-plus historic religious institutions, Rabbi Spiegel's congregation has been losing members for years and is now down to around 100 congregants in a building that seats upward of 1,800.
Such a decline in attendance can be found in many houses of worship across the country, as once thriving urban congregations lose their members to suburban migration or demographic shifts. The decline usually creates not only serious (perhaps unendurable) financial stress for the remaining worshippers but also an immense planning problem for city officials, as institutions that have long anchored neighborhoods deteriorate and invite demolition.
Noting the problem, the U.S. Interior Department, in 1999, began funding the restoration of churches, meetinghouses and synagogues under its Save America's Treasures program. Since last year, religious buildings listed on the National Register have been eligible for federal funds for repair. But these efforts are modest compared with the problem.
The history of First Roumanian is instructive. It follows a common urban pattern of immigrant devotion, migration and displacement. The building was Methodist before it was Jewish, according to David Dunlap, author of "From Abyssinian to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan's Houses of Worship." Built in 1888 as the Allen Street Methodist Episcopal Church, it "looks like those hybrid structures in Rome that bear witness to the accretions of centuries," he writes.
Meanwhile, Rabbi Spiegel's Congregation Shaarey Shamoyim, or Gates of Heaven, had been founded in 1860 on nearby Hester Street. Its numbers were growing as those of the Methodists were declining. Architectural historian Andrew Dolkart says that Lower East Side Methodists (who had themselves replaced Presbyterians) were really missionaries who sought to convert Jewish immigrants--though not very successfully. He unearthed the 1893 Report of the Missionary Society advising that "the existence of the church here attracts few. Our ordinary audiences are small, and contain almost no Jews."
Some time in the early 20th century the Methodists gave up and sold the building to First Roumanian, which flourished for decades as Jewish immigrants poured into the neighborhood. The congregation peaked in the 1940s, numbering in the thousands, says Rabbi Spiegel. The synagogue's prosperity and dazzling acoustics helped it become the "Cantor's Carnegie Hall," attracting such singers as Richard Tucker (Reuben Ticker) and Jan Peerce (Jacob Pincus Perelmuth).
Such glory is long gone. Even before the collapse of the roof, congregants worshipped in the downstairs social hall rather than in the main sanctuary. Almost everything in the building is in disrepair, though no official has yet publicly uttered the word "demolition." City Councilman Alan Jay Gerson notes that a community effort by Chinese, Latino and Jewish residents is under way to raise money and that everyone wants the building saved.
There are many ways to do this, of course, without saving the congregation. One of New York's most notorious nightclubs, the Limelight, long flourished in an 1846 neo-Gothic former Episcopal church. More respectably, former religious buildings now house schools, day-care centers, social-service centers and theaters. But this congregation wants to stay and rescue its building at the same time.
Peg Breen, the president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, says this is possible. After realizing that the congregation had done some facade work that "wasn't appropriate" in 1996, Ms. Breen's group offered to help. They paid for a building conditions survey and commissioned Mr. Dolkart to write up a national register description that would make the synagogue eligible for New York state government aid. The conservancy offered a grant of $4,000 from its own funds for repairs, and the Lower East Side Conservancy helped apply for a state grant of $280,000.
The congregation rejected both, though Rabbi Spiegel isn't sure why (and the records are buried in the rubble). Perhaps congregants were fearful of signing the required covenant preventing the sale or alteration of the building for 20 years without the state's permission. Sympathetic preservationists like Mr. Dolkart say that religious institutions can become apprehensive about outside interference.
And then there are those on the outside who don't believe that public funds should be used for such purposes. When Congress authorized a modest $10 million to restore historic California missions late last year, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State promptly sued. The rigid wall of separation between church and state that had prevented the government from financially aiding any operating religious building has been crumbling, though. Congress has allotted funds to repair the Old North Church in Boston, the Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I., and the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.
Even in secular New York, most residents probably agree with Councilman Gerson that First Roumanian should be saved as a synagogue. "Since 9/11," he says, "we've learned that spiritual infrastructure is every bit as important as physical infrastructure." That's something the synagogue's founders knew well.
Ms. Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
