Historic American Building Survey Drawings of Touro Synagogue come to the Redwood Library

by Daniel snydacker, Ph.D.

Touro Synagogue was designed by America’s so-called first architect Peter Harrison (1716-1775), and completed in 1763 for the small Jewish community that found a safe haven in Newport owing to the city’s commitment to the policy of religious liberty. The Synagogue is considered by many to be one of Harrison’s finest designs, and it is certainly one of America’s most important colonial buildings. Between 1957 and 1963, an extensive restoration of Touro Synagogue was undertaken and led by Gerald Watland, a nationally known preservation architect and specialist in 18th-century architecture brought in by the National Park Service to supervise the work. In that role, Watland directed the two young architects working for him on the project—J. Nagle and J. Meideros—to prepare what turned out to be the first and only complete set of measured drawings of the Synagogue ever produced.

Following the completion of the restoration, Watland submitted the drawings in 1969 to the Historic American Building Survey (HABS), the pre-eminent national repository of material that documents the country’s historic buildings and designed landscapes. The forty drawings in the set provide us with a comprehensive view of the way Touro Synagogue was built, the exceptional skill of Newport’s colonial craftsmen, and of the technical and stylistic affinities linking Touro to Harrison’s other major works in Newport: the Redwood Library (built 1748-1750) and the Brick Market (1772). The drawings show how period craftsmen implemented Harrison’s neo-Palladian designs, an architectural style then popular in England, but only recently adopted in the American Colonies, and how books—such as James Gibbs’s 1732 Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture and Batty Langley’s 1740 Treasury of Design—were integral to the transmission of Palladian architecture to America. Closer to our time, the drawings also offer up a window onto the history of the historic preservation movement in America.

work laid the groundwork for most of the other early Rhode Island HABS submissions, as the latter’s photographs became part of the first HABS entries for at least sixty-nine of Rhode Island’s most important historic structures, including the Redwood Library. The Early Homes of Rhode Island was thus an extremely valuable statewide inventory that was part of the preservation impulse behind the formation of HABS, being an early phase of the on-going, long-haul effort to document and preserve the American cultural landscape and make historic preservation a high federal priority.

HABs has since grown to become one of the largest collections of architectural documentation in the country, if not the world, and one of the most heavily used special collections in the Library of Congress. the standards for documentation developed by HABs have generated a uniform, comparable, and usable resource that makes it an essential tool in telling the story of American history and in guiding the restoration of countless historic buildings across the country.

At the beginning, however, there was another agenda. Initiated as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s effort to rebuild the Depression-ravaged U.S. economy, HABS was established in 1933 as part of the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA).3 From the beginning, HABS was a collaborative effort involving a wide variety of people and organizations, including the Library of Congress and the American Institute of Architects. The program was also designed to provide employment for over 1,000 out-of-work architects and photographers. Throughout its history, HABS documentation has dovetailed with the major national, state, and local preservation organizations— both professional and volunteer—and the decision to document a building has always come from both the top down and the bottom up. While the first phase of the HABS surveys ended with America’s entry into World War II, the enactment of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) in 1966 marked the beginning of a new era in federal preservation programs, including the re-booting of the HABS survey at a new level of professionalism.

By a remarkable turn of serendipity, a set of these drawings— made before Watland submitted the final copy to HABS1—became available for sale at Commonwealth Books on Washington Square in Newport. In consultation with the Touro Synagogue Foundation they have been acquired by the Redwood for the Library’s Special Collections. As coincidence would have it, the building occupied by Commonwealth Books is also part of the story. Known now as the Buliod-Perry House, the building was home to both Moses Levy and the Moses Seixas family before the Revolution. Levy was one of the original contributors to the construction of the Synagogue, and Seixas was a President of Touro Synagogue and a founding member of the King David Masonic Lodge in Newport.

In fact, the drawings were not the first materials submitted to HABS for the Synagogue. The earliest entry was made in 1937 at the very beginning of the HABS program and consisted of three photographs taken by the little-known Rhode Island photographer Arthur W. Le Boeuf. His photographs of Touro originally appeared in Antoinette Downing’s groundbreaking 1937 book The Early Homes of Rhode Island for which he was the photographer. In that same year Downing was appointed to serve on the advisory committee to the Rhode Island section of HABS.2 Downing’s and LeBeouf’s

HABS has since grown to become one of the largest collections of architectural documentation in the country, if not the world, and one of the most heavily used special collections in the Library of Congress. The standards for documentation developed by HABS have generated a uniform, comparable, and usable resource that makes it an essential tool in telling the story of American history and in guiding the restoration of countless historic buildings across the country. HABS and its affiliated engineering and landscape surveys record more than 500,000 drawings, photographs, and histories for more than 41,000 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the 21st century.4 It is thoroughly inclusive, and its subjects are multi-cultural, urban and rural, secular and profane, vernacular and high style.5

The HABS drawings of Touro Synagogue were produced just prior to this turning point in the history of the survey in the 1960s. Watland had them done as part of the due diligence he understood was needed to both preserve and document the building and its history. Their submission to the Library of Congress by Watland reflects his understanding of the historic preservation movement at both the local and national level, and they formed a bookend to the submission of photographs by LeBoeuf twenty-three years earlier.

This pattern of HABS records being created over time applies to the Redwood Library’s records as well. The Library benefited directly from the revival of HABS, for in 1970 the National Park

Service initiated the “Newport HABS Project,” which generated materials that were contributed to existing Newport HABS records as well as to the creation of several new ones. The measured drawings of Redwood were done at this time by Thomas Sanford, a professional draftsman. An extensive series of photographs was also taken by the National Park Service photographer, Jack E. Boucher, and added to many earlier records, including Redwood’s and Touro’s. Finally, additional photographs were taken of Redwood during the “Newport HABS Project” by the internationally recognized photographer Cervin Robinson, who worked during his long career for many of the country’s top architectural historians.6

There was one more important development that appeared after the revival of HABS in the 1960s, and that was the application of digital technology to the creation of material submitted to HABS starting in the 1980s. That decade witnessed the introduction of new drawing technologies such as Computer Aided Drafting (CAD). The gradual move from hand drawing to CAD enabled the recording of large-scale structures, and traditional hand-measuring has since been augmented by digitally rectified photogrammetry and three-dimensional laser scanning.7

As part of this transition to digital technology, scans were made by the Library of Congress of many of the HABS records, including these drawings, which are now available on-line. As convenient as they are, however, our casual acceptance of the permanence, accuracy, and reliability of on-line material is giving way to some concerns

Acquisition made possible with funds from the Elaine and Alexandre Rosenberg Charitable Foundation

1We know they were made before the set submitted to HABS because of internal evidence in the drawings themselves, most specifically the fact that the official labelling of the drawings done by HABS at the time of submission was missing from this set. They were, in all probability, the property of either Watland or his young apprentice, James Lee Nagle.

2Antoinette Downing is better known for her book with Vincent Scully The Architectural Heritage of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640-1915, (Cambridge MA. 1952. Harvard University Press, with subsequent editions) about the stability of the internet, and these paper drawings have the added value of being a safe, backup copy, stored right up the street from Touro at the Redwood Library.

3Much of the information about the history and value of HABS is found in American Place: The Historic American Building Survey at Seventy-Five Years, the catalogue of the 75th anniversary exhibition sponsored by the US Department of the Interior Museum and the National Park Service HABS program. See p. 13.

This digital technology has also largely replaced the traditional arts of hand-drawing and hand-inking. While this has made the production of measured drawings easier, many feel that something is lost in this transition. These drawings on paper were made by real people—Nagle and Medieros—and they retain the ineffable presence brought by the human hand that is so often lost to the onslaught of digital technology. Their very materiality adds to their affective power, far surpassing a digital reproduction. With now ready access to the drawings, students and scholars of historic preservation will have a direct view onto the work done to preserve Touro, the history of HABS, and the history of historic preservation in America over the last 90 years.

Daniel Snydacker, Ph.D. is is an architectural historian and formerly Director of the newport Historical society (1982-2004). He is currently working on a monograph devoted to the work of architect Robert H. Robertson

4Ibid, p. 85

5Ibid, p. 50

6See “An Eye Toward the Past: Remembering Architectural Photographer Cervin Robinson (1928–2022), https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/16032an-eye-toward-the-past-remembering-architectural-photographer-cervinrobinson-19282022

7American Place, op.cit., p. 73