Tour: Astoria Center of Israel, with Art Deco murals by Louis Pierre Rigal

Part of the Sacred Sites Open House Weekend sponsored by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, and co-sponsored by the Art Deco Society of New York. Free of charge, but registration required – click here to book. Doors open Sunday at 4:00 p.m, tour from 4:30 to 5:30.

Tony Robins will lead the tour of the building and its architecture, while art historian Joan Kahr will discuss Rigal’s murals.

Architect Louis Allen Abramson, a leader of the early-20th-century “synagogue center” movement, designed the Classic-Revival-style Astoria Center of Israel in 1925. An admirer of McKim, Mead & White, he later ascribed his early taste for Italian Renaissance-inspired design to “Stanford White’s Italian.” (You can read excerpts from Tony Robins’s 1980 interview with Abramson here.)

An unexpected treat in the sanctuary are the wonderful Art Deco murals added in 1929 by French artist Louis Pierre Rigal, who had exhibited at the 1925 Paris Exposition that gave us the name “Art Deco.” These are Rigal’s only known works in New York besides his much better known murals and mosaic at the Waldorf-Astoria in midtown.