Long the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim, 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood has been considered something of a sacred shrine since the death of the movement’s leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, in 1994. For decades, his followers have built replicas of the building across the world for their local communities—not only in Jerusalem and several American cities but also in Brazil, Chile, Italy, Australia, and India. Adam Iscoe relates 770’s architectural history:
The building came into the Lubavitchers’ hands in 1940. “The doctor who first owned the building had interesting taste,” a hasidic architect named Eli Meltzer said on a snowy afternoon last week, looking up at the shul. . . . In the 1930s, the doctor, a Jew, commissioned the three-story, triple-gabled, neo-Gothic Tudor revival (other historians have argued that it’s more neo-Jacobean) mansion from an architect named Edwin Kline. The style telegraphed Old World wealth, like a proto-McMansion. Kline also built a Tudor revival for Oscar Hammerstein, on Long Island.
As the Jewish news outlet the Forward has chronicled, the doctor, who performed illegal abortions in the house, lost his medical license, bribed a judge, and went to prison for tax evasion. The mansion was repossessed by the bank, which sold it to [Schneerson’s] father-in-law [and predecessor as the Lubavitcher rebbe], a rabbi who had just fled the Nazis in Poland and was looking for a headquarters for the Lubavitchers. He didn’t buy the house for its old-timey details (stained-glass sailboats, inset quatrefoils, an oriel window, ornamented spandrels, rumors of a crucifix). The deciding factor? The [then-rebbe], who had been tortured by the Soviets, required an elevator, and the mansion had one.
Read more on New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/29/chabad-headquarters-or-henry-viii-residence