Historic synagogue brought back to life.

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When Jill H. Gotthelf, associate with Walter Sedovic Architects, first walked into the Eldridge Street Synagogue, she took one look around her--where stray pigeons flapped around waterlogged rafters, where dust motes danced in the fractured light of cracked stained glass window and a "magical" wooden staircase defied laws of physics and remained standing for over a century--and knew she wanted to be part of its restoration. In the 17 years that passed, Gotthelf got married, and bore and raised three children while simultaneously working on Eldridge Street. As she chipped away at the project, examining layers of paint and dust and glass and wood, the synagogue slowly revealed itself to her.

Now, Gotthelf looks around at the newly restored building slated to be unveiled to the public December 2 and is in awe of what has its transformation. "This project has its own voice and its own story and you can feel that every time you walk into the space. I feel very blessed to have been able to work on this project, to be able to bring that story to light, to help that story be told," Gotthelf said.

Those sentiments are echoed by members of the synagogue's restoration team, many of whom were there in the early 1990's, a few years after the Eldridge Street Project was established, when wood was lifted off the building's sealed skylights and the day first streamed in, revealing the artistry of the building in the changing light. They spent years working alongside each other, finding the means to restore the Lower East Side landmark to its former grandeur; while simultaneously paying homage to the Eastern European Jewish immigrant community who teemed into the synagogue when it officially opened its doors in 1887 and remained in strong numbers through the 1940's. These numbers dwindled through the 1970s when people began to move to other neighborhoods, and sections of the crumbling building were cordoned off.

"Our goal remained authenticity. We did not want to erase history, but rather to help it be revealed here. We were very conscious of not making the synagogue look new, at the same time we didn't want to make it too old. We wanted to erase the damage that has been done, add the insertions we needed to add, but to leave people with the impression that this is a healthy 120-year-old building," said Diane S. Kaese, owners representative, who has worked on the project for 17 years.

Save for a single watercolor, no photographs or plans of the building existed. Restorers drew some information from minutes of the synagogue that dated back to the turn of the century, and interviews with community members. Mostly, though, they let the building teach them.

"Sometimes, neglect is the best tool for preservation. They locked the door [on the upper sanctuary of the synagogue for 25 years[ and made no changes, so we knew exactly what the building looked like. We didn't need any floor plans or blueprints to understand it," Gotthelf said.

Over time, as over $13 million in funds were raised and the team grew, the restoration process has become part of the story of the building itself. The Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center has donated money for the restorers to create a museum exhibit of the restoration process which includes photographs and excerpts from interviews with the artisans who worked on the building. The building itself tells the stories of their predecessors, the artisans who came before them.

"The touch of the human hand on this building is both apparent and amazing. As we worked, we could see this was a building that was built by people, not by a machine," Kaese said.

Former artisan's fingerprints are evident in small details and unexpected places. They may be glimpsed in the design of the domed ceiling where, deep in the over-painted branches and leaf design of a pendentive, there is a tiny red painted heart. The panels of the antiquated rose window reveals the artists, working from the bottom up, didn't leave enough space for a full panel on top so cut the glass into smaller panels. Patterns in the wide expanse of stained glass windows on the building reveal the way the artist repeated the same shades of glass in broad strokes around the exterior, making the relatively small palette of 16 shades seem greatly expanded.

"The techniques the artists used, the way they moved the glass around, made it look like there was a lot more going on than really was. You can really glimpse through these windows the efficiency and talent of the artists," said Ray Clagan, of the Gil Studio, who was in charge of a team who restored all the stained glass of Eldridge Street.

The restorers worked hard to show how the building had changed in other ways. The artisans' razor blades scraped 26 layers of paint, several of which were sent to paint labs to be analyzed. They found two main paint schemes along the inner walls of the building: two schemes which were revealed in the aisles of the sanctuary. The restorers noticed these schemes looked distinctly different under gas and electric light, corresponding to the time when the congregation switched their power source. For the most part, they cleaned the paint up, stripping it down only to the second paint scheme and leaving the first paint scheme buried. Thin strips of the original paint scheme are revealed in specific planned spots in the synagogue.

"Those strips reveal the layers of the building's history. They help to tell both the story of immigration into the synagogue, and our interpretation of that story through its restoration," said Amy Milford, deputy director of the Eldridge Street Project.

Clagan's team performed painstaking work to recreate the buildings magnificent stained glass windows. They took rubbings of the windows and photographed over 300 distinct sections with a light box. The windows were then disassembled and put into a large tank of water and cleaned. The lead was unwrapped and the glass that could be salvaged was set aside. Later after several door to door visits to various glass manufactures and the replication of numerous cast glass jewels, the windows were put back together. It is only now, almost six years after they began the process, that the windows are starting to be reinstalled.

"It's exciting right now. When you work in the studio, the ideas that you have, the patterns you are recreating, are all still a bit abstract. Now that the panels are beginning to be installed, we can really see the results of all that work," Clagan said. Early on in the project, architect Walter Sedovic introduced the concept of sustainability into the Eldridge Street Project. They used salvaged materials that carne from the body of the synagogue and purchased sustainable materials such as insulation made out of recycled blue jeans.

One of the most basic ways the project was made sustainable was through the architects designs on how to excavate underneath the building and create a room for mechanical systems and storage rooms rather than to build out or up and increase the building's footprint.

"This is fundamentally a green project because we are preserving as much as we can of the original site. There is all that embodied energy in the materials and the labor," Sedovic said.

Where possible, they tried to minimize the new "inserts" they had to bring to the project to align it with current building and tire codes, by keeping most of the mechanics downstairs, and angling vents far from visitors sightlines. They struck up compromise deals with the Fire Department to maintain the building's original staircase by inserting steel anchors at the staircase joints, for instance.

The building has been altered slightly for aesthetic purposes. For instance the rose window will be back lit so residents can see it from the street.

"That's the point of this project. The visitor will walk through the door and will be able to feel that grandeur, that grandeur both of the past and of the present. Hopefully, they will be able to recognize the markings left behind from the people who prayed here in the past. At the same time, we wanted to show that something has changed here. That we area part of that change," Milford said.