Historic East Village synagogue on sale as a $2.5 million home

EAST VILLAGE, Manhattan (PIX11) – A synagogue built in the East Village in 1841 and landmarked a century later is on the market now as a $2.5 million home. 

The three-bedroom property, which sits on the upper level of the three-unit building on Sixth Street near First Avenue, maintains its original limestone facade and stained glass windows, according to its Compass listing. 

The building was landmarked as part of the East Village Historic District, a grouping of about 325 buildings built in the 19th and 20th centuries along Second Avenue between East Second Street and East Seventh Street. The Sixth Street was built in 1841 as a home but altered in 1910 to become a synagogue, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. 

Outside, the building boasts round-arched windows with stained glass, iron fencing, engraved Hebrew lettering and double metal entry doors.

Inside, the renovated 1,700-square-foot home has oak flooring, marble countertops and an in-unit washer and dryer. A private elevator brings residents up to the open upper unit, last sold in 2018 for $1.9 million, according to the Compass listing.

In 2023, part of another converted synagogue was listed on Sixth Street, once home to a Polish or Ukranian social club and the long-term home to a slew of artists, according to Curbed. One 2-bedroom unit in the building was valued at $1.6 million and another at $2.25 million.

The synagogue was once home to an orthodox Jewish congregation named after a town in Poland. It’s a marker of the influx of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish immigration to the Lowe East Side in the late 19th and 20th Centuries, according to the LPC.

Nearby sits a Protestant Hungarian house of worship, and the architecture of 415 East Sixth Street is indicative of similar religious buildings in the neighborhood. 

“The building is a notable example of the ‘tenement synagogue’ typology—small religious buildings that fit into the typical 25 foot wide residential lot—which were erected throughout the neighborhood,” LPC researchers wrote in the historic district’s 2012 report.