No doubt there are more than a few individuals looking at these pictures or visiting our synagogue in person wondering why we are where we are. It’s a fair question that requires a very simple answer. In the picture below, you see the junction of St. Paul Street and three streets branching off from it. Of course, you probably don’t recognize it now, but from right to left, is Queenston Street, Niagara Street and Geneva Street. Eventually, Geneva at the far left crossed St. Paul Street at that very intersection and carried on to the canal and the burgeoning South End. What’s important to know though is that on all four sides of the picture below would have been the places of business and residence of all the earliest Jewish settlers. St. Paul Street, of course, became the hub of the business district because it followed the path of the oldest version of the Welland Ship Canal. Slowly, but surely the more prosperous or more adventuresome merchants began businesses at the opposite end of St. Paul, where it meets Ontario Street.
The picture below showed the street as it became later on in its evolution. As the Jewish community grew before, during, and after the First World War, more stately homes replaced the much shabbier earlier dwellings. What that meant was that, instead of families living together and sharing rooming houses or multiple residence apartment buildings, families were able to live in their own homes. The synagogue was built on Calvin Street, one block down Queenston street on the right hand side with the old car heading in that direction. But the earliest families – the Newmans, the Hoffmans, the Coopermans, the Pomerantzs, the Adelsteins, the Morrises, just to name a few, all had houses within a block or two radius of the intersection of Church and Calvin. If your experience of city living stems from a larger city, it is not easy to see how the streets evolved because everything was in relation to the canal’s path in those days. So Church Street followed pretty much an arc along the horizon starting , Queenston on the far right, crossing Niagara to the left of the white building in the middle, and proceeding to Geneva off to the left. The early minyan locations were all in that same neighbourhood. Naturally, the shul was erected in the same neighbourhood so that everyone could walk to and from shul on Shabbat.
