Revealing “new” photos from the 1948 sanctuary dedication

UNTIL TODAY, I had never known what the façade of Mishkon’s sanctuary looked like when the building was dedicated on 9/26/1948. But now I have come across the thumbnail images of two photographic negatives in the online archive of the Santa Monica History Museum. They held several surprises!

(As usual, click/tap on an image to enlarge it—
although in this case it’s a low-resolution image.)

This archive actually holds 15 film negatives of that auspicious day at Mishkon some 75 years ago — including of the Torah procession and the ceremonial ribbon-cutting. Given their glorious detail, they seem to have been made with a large-format camera. All of the images appear to differ from what is now in the possession of our synagogue.

Below the jump, I will focus on the building-related facts that I gleaned from examining the online thumbnail images.…

From the images, I learned certain basic facts about the building’s architectural features. (The following facts were not mentioned even in the 2003 Historic Structure Report.) Proceeding from left to right in the photograph above, I notice that:

• There was a white half-column located to the left of the street-level doors to the Social Hall, which has since been completely removed.
• Those doors to the Social Hall were not the same type as those on the portico level.
• The same type of pendant lamp fixtures that still hang from the sanctuary’s interior ceiling were also hung outside on the portico.
• The disks above each of the outer columns were part of the façade design as it was originally built. (On the significance of this fact, see my post here.)

In addition, I realized a couple of more ephemeral aspects of our synagogue’s frontage:

• The street trees had not yet been planted.
• It appears that the planter on the south side had not yet been constructed, and the marquee monument sign had not yet been installed. (Presumably that was work in progress at the time of the dedication.)

For each photograph, the website offers its users an image request form. The cost of getting a photograph appears to be a function of the nature of the request and who is making it. Who would like to pursue getting copies for Mishkon to have?