East End Temple (New York City, New York)

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4-story (plus raised basement) French Renaissance-style synagogue completed in 1883 as a townhouse for Sidney Webster, a lawyer who was private secretary to President Franklin Pierce, and son-in-law to U.S. Senator Hamilton Fish. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt, it is the only surviving New York residence by the architect of the Statue of Liberty's pedestal.

The house was owned for a time in the 1980s and '90s by the nearby Beth Israel Medical Center and used as a psychiatric clinic, but is now owned by the East End Temple, Congregation El Elmet (God of Truth), a Reform congregation which was founded in 1948. The redesign of the house into a synagogue was done by BKSK Architects and LWC Designs. The redesign was completed in 2004.

It is clad in red brick above a high ground floor and basement of brownstone. A broad, fairly low stoop on the left, with stone sidewalls featuring round cutouts, leads to a gracious stone doorway with paneled wooden double-doors, above which there is a tripartite transom
with a handsome wrought-iron grill. The varied window treatment contributes to the interesting, asymmetrical quality of the house. The paired windows at the first floor, set higher than the entrance, are surmounted by a single Gothic drip molding and separated by a carved bas-relief panel of Renaissance inspiration. Below, the basement level has two single-windows on the right, and a double-window to the left, all with rounded corners and wrought-iron grilles.

A molded string course separates the stone-faced first floor from the brick upper floors and serves as a sill for the 2nd-floor windows. The square-headed, irregularly spaced upper story windows have keyed enframements. All the windows have horizontal transom bars; the four contiguous windows on the 3rd floor have vertical mullions as well. Above the 3rd-floor cornice is a sloping slate roof with four regularly spaced, picturesque dormer windows. The windows are connected by a stone band course which runs above them. A molded coping further unites the gables, framing the steep roof behind. Wonderful metal ornamentation drips onto the slate shingles of the roof.

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