News

Luxe Condo Atop East Village Synagogue Priced at Cool $4M

Image by Stribling

By Lilly Maier September 12, 2016

Ever dream about living in a synagogue? Well, you can get pretty close now that a historic lower East Side tenament synagogue has converted its top floors into luxury aeries.

All you need is about $4 million to make it happen.

Developer East River Partners just finished several luxury apartments housed on the upper floors of the Adas Yisroel Anshe Meseritz synagogue in the now uber-hip New York City neighborhood. The three condos – including a two-floor 2,500 square feet penthouse – are listed between $2.95 and §4.4 million.

The Meseritz Synagogue is the Lower East Side’s last neoclassical “tenement synagogue” and its limestone façade features delicate ornaments and colorful stained glass. The Orthodox shul was originally built in 1910 by Eastern European Jews.

Synagogue East Village #condos reveal historic details, and they are beautiful: https://t.co/5NTpfV3a5R #interiors pic.twitter.com/32FJV29xMy

— Sherry Roberts (@SherryER) September 11, 2016

Back in 2008, the historic synagogue was on the verge of being torn down after its board approved a deal with Kushner Companies, the real-estate firm of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband. The New York Times reportedat the time that the plan called for Kushner to “build a new six-story building on the site, with a synagogue on the first two floors and 10 apartments on the top four stories.”

Kushner Companies eventually pulled out of the deal, after a major community protest. Under the new deal with East River Partners, the original synagogue space was preserved on the lower and basement floor, and the developer agreed to renovate it, according to dnainfo.com.

“It’s been a privilege to be able to work with the synagogue and to do something special for a historical site,” Joseph Cohen, one of the founders of the development firm, told the New York Times in 2015.

East River Partners also kept original elements in the residential parts of the building – including the stained glass and original copper double-entry doors. The building itself is within a historic district in the East Village.

Reach Lilly Maier at [email protected] or on Twitter at @lillymmaier.

Lilly Maier is a news intern at the Forward. She is a graduate journalism student at New York University, where she studies as a Fulbright scholar. She also holds a B.A. in Jewish history from the University of Munich. Contact Lilly at [email protected], read her portfolio, or follow her on Twitter.

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