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560 Trinity Avenue (at 6848 Delmar Boulevard)
University City, Missouri 63130
www.wustl.edu/arts/560
The building now occupied by Washington
University’s Department of Music was
built in 1931 as the third home of Congregation
Shaare Emeth.
Founded in 1868 by 63 members from B’nai El, most of them immigrants
from Germany, Shaare
Emeth (“Gates of Truth”) became the third Jewish congregation in St. Louis but the first to
embrace the Reform movement. Thomas Brady designed the
first temple in 1869 at 17th and Pine in the exotic Moorish
Revival style. Theodore Link and A. F. Rosenheim designed a
Richardsonian Romanesque building with a tall tower at Lindell and
Vandeventer in 1895. On the present site, the congregation
originally intended to adapt the then-existing building, an
authentic-looking Egyptian temple designed in 1905 by Ralph Chesley Ott
for a bank but used by publisher Edward Gardner Lewis to house newspaper
presses. When reuse proved impossible, Shaare Emeth called
in Alfred S. Alschuler (1876-1940), who had become especially well known
for his synagogues, notably Temple
Isaiah in his native Chicago. Here he worked in the
Art Deco mode then becoming popular, simplifying and streamlining the
pilasters and other classical elements seen in his earlier temples.
Typical of the style are the bands of geometric patterning and
other flat decorative features, including the subtly shaded mosaics in
the main auditorium representing religious symbols. The
dominant violet-red color of the interior is regarded as a royal color
in this tradition. On the side facing
Trinity Avenue, the building contains a large
multipurpose room and a wealth of other facilities.
After Shaare Emeth moved west to Ballas and Ladue Roads, the St.
Louis Conservatory and School for the Arts, popularly known as CASA,
moved into this building in 1975. Ruth Fischlowitz Marget purchased the
building for the organization in 1978. CASA combined a college-level
conservatory with the
Community
Music School,
which offered music education to children. The auditorium became widely
known for recitals by some of the world’s greats, including Elly Ameling
and Jessye Norman. After the conservatory closed, the Community Music
School continued, first in 1994 through
a merger with the St. Louis Symphony Society, then in 2001 with Webster University. Washington
University purchased the building in
2005.
Notes by
Esley Hamilton
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