This stunning temple-front Greek Revival home on Main Street in Ridgefield, Connecticut is an absolute dream! The home was built in the mid-19th century for Henry Smith, who operated a shirt factory in town with his father. The house’s gable roof facing the street completes a pediment, which is supported by a projecting portico of four colossal Ionic columns. In the pediment, a gorgeous Palladian window adds so much character to the facade. I love a good temple-front classical home!
In the early 20th-century, Hull was linked by ferry, railway and road to Boston and this resort town became a popular urban recreational destination. Between 1915 and 1920, Jewish Bostonians started buying property and building summer homes in the area. The new Jewish summer residents required a temple for worship when away from their main homes. In 1920, land was purchased just north of the bustling Nantasket Beach for the erection of a place of worship. This temple was likely built by a Jewish architect/builder Joseph Rudnick, who arrived in Boston from present-day Lithuania in 1886. Unable to speak English, he hired a tutor to teach it to him, and quickly began working on constructing apartments and other buildings all over the Boston area. Temple Israel of Nantasket remains a handsome and rare example of a 1920 American
wood-framed, stucco-clad synagogue, with an active congregation.
Built five years before the Temple Ohabei Shalom in Brookline, the Temple Kehillath Israel on Harvard Street employs a similar architectural aesthetic of the Byzantine Revival style. The Jewish community of Brookline had grown significantly since the early 1900s, reaching a population of 4,000 by 1921. The congregation which constructed this temple had temporary quarters in a building at Harvard and Thorndike streets. By March 1921, it was decided to build a temple, and in 1922, the cornerstone was laid for a building which would cost an estimated $150,000 and have a capacity for 1,000. Plans submitted by architects architects Albert MacNaughton and George E. Robinson showed the large structure with space to build outbuildings as the congregation was expected to keep up with growth.
In 1948, an Art Deco Community House, designed by Samuel Glaser, was constructed of stone replicated the materiality of the temple, but with Modern features, a connector addition was added in 1958. The congregation is currently in the midst of a huge building campaign, which began with the exterior restoration of the temple building, followed by a modernization and restoration of the interior. In 2019, the 1948 Community House was razed to make way for an affordable housing development, called the Brown Family House.
Congregation Ohabei Shalom was founded in 1842, and is the longest enduring Jewish congregation in Massachusetts and the second in New England after Touro Synagogue located in Newport, Rhode Island. The congregation grew from the original eight families to over a hundred and was forced to continually relocate around Boston for enough space until it purchased the former South Congregational Church on Union Park Street in the South End (now St. John the Baptist). The South End became a hub for Boston’s Jewish community and the congregation continued to grow, alongside catholic and other religious groups in the area, notably the Holy Cross Cathedral a block away. By the turn of the century, the jewish population began to shift outward to Brookline and other outlying cities, which only increased after WWII.
Land was secured on Beacon Street in Brookline in 1921 and the congregation hired the Boston firm of Blackall, Clapp and Whittemore to design a large new temple and sanctuary. The Byzantine-Romanesque edifice and its magnificent sanctuary were completed in 1928. Modeled on themes from Hagia Sophia and the Great Synagogue of Florence, Italy, it has a commanding presence on the busy street to this day. The temple was to even have a large corner tower, which never materialized. With its use of polychromatic masonry and Byzantine ornament, and capped by a great copper dome, the congregation boasts one of the most architecturally outstanding religious buildings in the area.
The Jechonias Thayer House is high-style temple-front Greek Revival home in the Doric order in Braintree, MA. The two-story columns support the colonnade and heavy pedimented gable. The home was built for Jechonias Thayer, a wholesale and retail grocery merchant in downtown Boston. Thayer died in Boston in 1876. He built this house on his ancestral homestead at Braintree about 1835, the year his father, Solomon Thayer, died. Solomon Thayer had lived here in an earlier dwelling. This house also served as a country home for the next owner, Edward Reed (d.1891), a Boston iron merchant. After this, the home was purchased by Leonard F. Norris (1831-1908), in 1893. Norris reportedly was one of the early settlers of North Bridgewater, and worked as a real estate broker in that city. His son, F. Edgar Norris, inherited the property and renovated it. The younger Norris, Lowell Ames Norris was an author who dubbed the property “Norcrest”, wrote about the renovated home which made it in many architectural publications.
Buildings of New England 