The congregation known today as the Park Avenue Synagogue was founded by German Jews in 1882 as the Reform congregation, "Temple Gates of Hope." It was also known as the Eighty-sixth Street Temple due to its location on that street. Twelve years later, the society joined with Congregation Agudat Yesharim ("The Association of the Righteous"), with which it is still aligned. In 1920, the congregation merged with the Seventy-second Street Temple, itself a product of the earlier merger of two congregations—Beth Israel ("House of Israel") and Bikkur Cholim ("Visitors to the Sick")—with roots in the Lower East Side dating back to the 1840s. In 1923, the Eighty-sixth Street Temple changed its name to the Park Avenue Synagogue.

Ad in The Architect (June 1927)
View of the Dome (1927)

From 1925 to 1927, the present sanctuary, located on East 87th Street between Park and Madison Avenues, was constructed to the design of Walter S. Schneider of Deutsch & Schneider. The synagogue building, designed with a beautiful cast stone façade, marked the end of a period beginning in Europe in the 1850s when the Moorish style was often used for synagogues. The inscription on the façade is taken from Psalm 26 and reads: I LOVE YOUR TEMPLE ABODE, THE DWELLING-PLACE OF YOUR GLORY. The interior provides seating for 1200 during the High Holy Days. Moorish decoration is used throughout, from Arabesque dadoes to a “mugarnas” design for the octagonal domed ceiling.

In 1928, Atereth Israel, a congregation of Alsatian Jews who worshipped in their building on East 82nd Street, merged with Park Avenue Synagogue. By the 1930s, the Park Avenue congregation changed its affiliation from Reform Judaism to Conservative in order to accommodate the merger of the congregation with several other congregations containing large numbers of Eastern European Jews.

In 1955, an annex by Kelly & Gruzen with a stained glass façade by Adolf Gottlieb, known as the Milton Steinberg House, was dedicated to the memory of the late distinguished spiritual leader, Rabbi Milton Steinberg, to serve the community and the religious school. Over time, however, those facilities became inadquate to meet the demands of the growing Upper East Side community, and in 1980, it was replaced by a new addition that doubly serves as a living memorial to the more than one million Jewish children who were slaughtered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.