Restoring Mendelsohn, Building Community: The Adaptive Reuse of Park Synagogue in Cleveland Heights

Editorial Introduction

 

Erich Mendelsohn’s Park Synagogue building in Cleveland Heights is one of the most influential Modernist sacred spaces of the postwar era, and certainly one of the most influential synagogues in the United States. Completed between 1950 and 1953, Park Synagogue is both prototypical and outstanding. The bucolic setting, surface parking lot, flexible partitions to accommodate the flood of High Holiday worshippers, expansive education wing: each was a major trend in postwar synagogue design and a response to the suburbanization of American Jews. But whereas other designers may have struggled to avoid explicit historicist references in their attempt to accommodate a new kind of Jewish space, Park Synagogue, and especially the sanctuary’s monumental, Expressionist dome, succeeded in harkening back to Old World traditions. Mendelsohn achieved a Modernism that never broke away from the past. 

A case study for other postwar synagogue designers, Park Synagogue is now becoming an important precedent in the preservation and adaptive reuse of Modernist sacred places. In 2005, after a half-century of use, the congregation moved five miles down the road to a new campus, Park Synagogue East. In 2021, the congregation sold the original 28-acre Cleveland Heights campus to Sustainable Community Associates (SCA), a local real estate development firm. SCA’s proposal for a multi-phase redevelopment project entitled Park Arts centers on an arts and culture hub, much like the adaptive reuse of Mendelsohn’s B’nai Amoona synagogue outside of St. Louis (now the Center of Creative Arts) and Temple Tifereth-Israel in Downtown Cleveland (now the Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center for Case Western Reserve University). SCA formed Friends of Mendelsohn, a nonprofit, to own the original Mendelsohn buildings and steward the non-profit components of the larger redevelopment. Recently, SCA announced that Oberlin College and Conservatory’s new BFA in Integrated Arts will become the project’s anchor tenant. New housing is set for the perimeter of the site. 

To learn more about the process of transforming Park Synagogue into Park Arts, Gianfranco Grande and Kevin Block of Partners for Sacred Places first spoke with Eric Zamft and later Naomi Sabel. Zamft is the Director of Planning, Neighborhoods, and Development for the City of Cleveland Heights. Sabel, along with Josh Rosen and Ben Ezinga, is one of the founders and principals of SCA. Sabel, Rosen, and Ezinga are now following the lead of a mentor and fellow Oberlin graduate, Richard Baron, who redeveloped the Center of Creative Arts. Together, Zamft and Sabel describe the collective effort and cooperation necessary for this exciting project to move forward. As they reiterate in their comments below, many different groups have made vital contributions to the project in addition to the intrepid developers, including municipal staff and the mayor’s office, Ohio SHPO staff, other state officials, and local advocacy and neighborhood groups. Because of this collective reinvestment in one of our country’s most remarkable examples of Modernist religious architecture, the original Park Synagogue campus will remain a vital community asset in Cleveland Heights. It will also remain a sacred place. At least for the next 99 years, the congregation will be able to host High Holiday services, as well as other kinds of performances and gatherings, under the canopy of Mendelsohn’s great dome.

The Importance of the Site

Zamft: The Park Synagogue site is off of Mayfield Road and Euclid Heights Boulevard, smack dab in the middle of our city. City Hall actually sits in Severance Town Center, which is about a mile away from the Park Synagogue site. We refer to this area as the heart of Cleveland Heights. Cleveland Heights is known as the “City of Trees” – it’s actually our logo – and whereas Severance Town Center, where City Hall sits, became a mall site – a typical 1950s-60s suburban mall and then a big box, power center – the Park Synagogue Site remained this green oasis within a built-out community from its founding through today. And so what’s currently there is a beautiful campus with the historic synagogue, an educational building that’s attached to it, and then various other buildings spread amongst the site. 

How the site interacts with nature, historically and into the future, is so important. It really is this oasis that neighbors use as a place to walk their dogs, go for a run, go for a stroll. I’ve been known to run through the site on my way around the city. But to the average resident in our community or visitors, they don’t even know it’s there. I mean, that’s how forested the site is on both sides. That’s really significant, because Park Synagogue is an example of a site that probably, historically, has been insulated from public use. The neighbors, of course, have always been encouraged or invited to utilize it, but the average person didn’t know. And so when we’re talking about the congregation and the changes that they’re going through by moving further east (to Pepper Pike) where their population is and now they’ve got this site that’s essentially sitting underutilized, there might have been an easy inclination for the congregation to just sell it to somebody else and for the community to say, “Oh, well.” But that’s not what’s happening here. What’s happened here is a collective effort by the congregation, by the developers that they’ve chosen, and the community – the City being part of the community – to try to preserve this really amazing space.

The Role of Community Engagement and the Emergence of a New Vision

Zamft: About three years ago, when there had been these rumors that the congregation was looking to sell the property, a number of the neighbors on Compton Road asked to have a meeting with myself and some other officials. And they said, “We really love this site. We would hate to see it go in the wrong direction and, City, what can you do?” The answer was not much. It’s privately owned. But you know what? Let’s start to interact with the congregation. And as part of that process, there became a dialogue so that when they had to make a decision, when they went out to get bids for the site or interest for the site, they understood that they needed a developer and a partner that was going to do something that the community was going to support. That process was really important and that’s where the government can get involved early on. Not in any regulatory way, but just to say we can help convene meetings, we know what is important to this community, we can help to identify the values and ethos that are going to be really important to a private property owner however this thing moves forward.    

 

Sabel: We’ve developed a reputation in Cleveland as being people who jump into really complicated projects enthusiastically, so when the decision was made by the congregation to sell Park Synagogue, several congregants reached out to us.  We asked them to consider not selling and instead giving us time to conduct a master plan so that we could really understand what should be there. They agreed with the condition that if an implementable plan was established, that we would do it. With the support of the Cleveland Foundation, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, and local philanthropists, we spent 18 months trying to understand the opportunities, needs and what the future of Park Synagogue should look like. The congregation deserves tremendous credit for their thoughtful stewardship of the legacy of Mendelsohn’s synagogue. 

Our fundamental question was what could happen at Park Synagogue that couldn’t happen elsewhere in Cleveland? Because it is a building that’s unlike any other building and it’s a site unlike any other site. It’s very rare to have a first-ring suburb with 28 acres of beautiful open space, let alone one that also holds an architectural masterpiece. It was the capacity to build a campus, to build a new neighborhood essentially that was so unique. In our master planning sessions, we frequently heard the desire for intergenerational housing and intergenerational programming.  We spoke to members of the congregation and found that for them, Park was not just as a temple but a community center. You can see that so clearly in Mendelsohn’s design – the sanctuary, the social hall, the school wing. The continuation of Park as a center for community and education felt incredibly appropriate. And then at the same time, we commissioned a study of the needs of local arts organizations and saw some very interesting opportunities. Oberlin’s vision for their new BFA in Integrated Arts in combination with the community arts component is very exciting.

In some cases, you can extract the historic building from its context and focus on its restoration, but you can’t do that at Park because so much of Mendelsohn’s design was its integration into the site. And so the preservation of green space and making that a public amenity became a priority as well.

 

Zamft: One of the biggest lessons is that when there’s engagement early on and there’s communication early on, bumps in the road don’t become mountains. I’ll give you a really clear example. Not surprisingly, there was some opposition to any change because that’s a natural response. In any community, the status quo is what we’re comfortable with. And certainly, the literal “Not In My Backyard.” There were neighbors who said, “I enjoy looking at the dome exactly as it is. I don’t want even one tree to be moved.” But since there had been so much work that SCA in particular put in with the neighborhood, there were two times, three times, ten times as many people who came out and expressed their support for the project than were against it. Ultimately, that makes the administrative side a lot easier and it helps the decision makers to say, “Yes, we hear your opposition or your concern about this proposal, but this is for the best of the community.”

Preserving the Legacy of Park Synagogue and Mendelsohn

Sabel:

At the beginning, we spent time talking with congregants and the Park leadership committees. They didn’t want their legacy in Cleveland Heights to be simply how the building closed. They didn’t want this to be a departure story. And so I think that really inspired the public purpose of the work that we’re doing here. How does this next chapter become one of Park evolving into a beloved space for the entire community rather than a tragedy?

This building and this congregation are so culturally entwined with the Jewish community in Cleveland. The stories of this congregation are symbolic of the larger American Jewish story. You can look at Park Synagogue and its congregation as a microcosm of post-Holocaust, American Jewry, it just tells the story beautifully. Including this new chapter, which is that the congregation has moved from downtown Cleveland, to the first suburb, to the farther suburbs. The preservation of this building and its repurposing as an arts and education space for the entire community is an important continuation of that story.

 

Zamft: We’re a built-up community. We don’t have all that many opportunities to reinvent ourselves. We’re your classic inner-ring streetcar suburb, 85% residential. Some really nice, important commercial districts. Not a lot of industrial or institutional. In order for us to be resilient and sustainable, we need to take these former spaces and reimagine them and reinvent them. But we also want to make sure that we respect the past and this history that we have, which is so important to so many people. And it’s not just land use history, but this sociological history of Cleveland Heights being one of the places where a religious population moving out from Cleveland felt comfortable making a new home. To this day, it’s a place where I think the sacred and profane interact really well. There’s that respect. The City’s moniker is “All Are Welcome.” And so all should be welcome by looking backwards and forwards. Again, we could have the opposite. They could tear down the building – well, they couldn’t now! But there could be somebody who would propose to build office towers all around it and industrial and that would just erase this part of our history and destroy the fabric that makes Cleveland Heights so great.

Lessons Learned and the Importance of Preserving Modernist Sacred Places

Zamft:  The design of the synagogue building, the dome in particular, is so inspirational and I think people just have to see it for themselves. It’s truly amazing. And, imagine, it’s right in the heart of our city and people don’t know about it. I encourage everyone to do more research, if you haven’t already done it, on some of these great architectural gems in your communities. You don’t have to go off to Germany to learn about the Bauhaus! You can find it in the United States, in your own backyard.

Sabel: It’s too early for lessons learned – we are just beginning, so I look forward to that. It’s such a rare opportunity that’s presented at Park Synagogue. When it was constructed, it was the fourth largest dome in the world. That’s not something that can be replicated, or the story behind the dome. You had a congregation coming out of the Holocaust and commissioning Mendelsohn in ‘47 to build a dome on a ribbon of glass. Only through historic preservation would a person be able to contend with the meaning behind all of that. There’s a richness in these spaces – both embodied energy and an embodied spirit – that can’t be replicated.

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About the Authors

Gianfranco Grande, the Executive Vice President of Partners for Sacred Places, has worked with more than 1,000 community-serving congregations in his career. Recent projects include Chicago Loop Synagogue, KAM Isaiah Israel in Hyde Park, and Touro Synagogue in New Orleans. Grande also serves on the Board of the Museum at Eldridge Street, housed in the former Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York’s Lower East Side. Kevin Block is the Director of Special Initiatives at Partners. He works across programs, consulting, and research projects for Partners. Block serves on the Board of the Center for the Preservation of Modernism, Thomas Jefferson University. A nondenominational, nonprofit organization, Partners is committed to supporting all congregations in the United States steward their older and historic buildings for worship and active community use.