Was down on the Lower East Side this evening to see the college's Spring theater production - Shakespeare's "Tempest," directed wonderfully by my friend C, and starring lots of students I know - and noticed some interesting views along the way (not quite
religious geography but almost). The block of Eldridge Street where the synagogue is was just cleaning up after a movie shoot, for which someone had gone all out for the Chinatown look: red lanterns, a dragon dance, and lots of fireworks and shiny confetti. A few blocks away sits a Buddhist temple, 正覚寺 (I don't know how it's pronounced), on whose roof stupa there's graffiti which
might be a mystical Sanskrit character, I suppose!
And a good few blocks beyond that (Norfolk St.) is what was clearly once a church, then clearly a synagogue, and now evidently abandoned. (It's Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, I learn from the Web, the Eastern European orthodox congregation from which the founders of Eldridge Street split; it seems to have closed just last year as its numbers dwindled to 20. (For images of the inside, see the slideshow in this
article from the
New York Sun.)
Was down on the Lower East Side this evening to see the college's Spring theater production - Shakespeare's "Tempest," directed wonderfully by my friend C, and starring lots of students I know - and noticed some interesting views along the way (not quite 
religious geography but almost). The block of Eldridge Street where the synagogue is was just cleaning up after a movie shoot, for which someone had gone all out for the Chinatown look: red lanterns, a dragon dance, and lots of fireworks and shiny confetti. A few blocks away sits a Buddhist temple, 正覚寺 (I don't know how it's pronounced), on whose roof stupa there's graffiti which might be a mystical Sanskrit character, I suppose! 
And a good few blocks beyond that (Norfolk St.) is what was clearly once a church, then clearly a synagogue, and now evidently abandoned. (It's Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, I learn from the Web, the Eastern European orthodox congregation from which the founders of Eldridge Street split; it seems to have closed just last year as its numbers dwindled to 20. (For images of the inside, see the slideshow in this article from the New York Sun.)
