How do city blockfronts and corners achieve perfection? The buildings don’t have to be masterpieces – it may be best if they aren’t. Variety is key, but so is compatibility. Scale is all important: Our experience of urban places is affected by our sense of enclosure. Urban places can be claustrophobic, or overbearing, or can make you feel adrift, untethered. When done right, they make you feel gently cradled in comforting arms.

Beyond that, the facades must be facades – that is, they must function as the expressive public face of the building, respecting the person in the street, not the plan of the building. The design, materials, workmanship, and ornamentation should all repay close or casual scrutiny, close-up or from across the street or down the block, all at once.

To see what I mean, go to the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Garfield Place in Park Slope, Brooklyn. On the northeast corner is a grand synagogue, Congregation Beth Elohim, known as Garfield Temple. The architect, Simeon Eisendrath, had worked in Chicago for Louis Sullivan. Completed in 1910, it is one of the best classical synagogues in the city, an object lesson in how monumentality can work within an intimate setting.

The building is oriented diagonally to the corner, with a not-too-small, nottoo-grand flight of stairs leading to a dramatic high entryway. Note the deft handling of scale, the way the triangular-pedimented doorway yields to a high arched window that in turn rises to an entablature surmounted by a colossal rounded pediment. Urbanism meets symbolism in this diagonal arrangement, which makes clear that the building is pentagonal in plan, symbolizing the Pentateuch.

Up close, the building does not seem imposing. The farther you get from it, the more monumental it seems. It’s when you pull away that you see the splendid saucer dome, which registers beautifully on the skyline of its low-rise neighborhood.

Abutting the synagogue to the north is a lovely four-story Beaux Arts apartment building, completed a year after the synagogue. Its architect, Montrose Morris, gave us a ground floor of rusticated limestone, with red brick above, “frosted” with cream-colored brick and terra cotta. A modillioned cornice and lovely iron balconies carried on console brackets add a high degree of visual interest. The building has a twin around the corner on Montgomery Place, which itself is one of the most beautiful streets in New York (and the subject of a future column). Both the apartment building and the synagogue would be great buildings anywhere. Side by side, they are magic.

But as important to an ensemble such as this are the background buildings, which were seldom designed by famous architects yet which form the fabric of our streets. At the northwest corner of Eighth Avenue and Garfield Place is a superb background building, an elegant but not attention-grabbing low-rise apartment house called the Belvedere, designed by Henry Pohlman (who created quite a bit of Park Slope fabric) and built in 1903.

There’s more, but these are the essential ingredients. It wasn’t masterplanned. It’s just what our builders and architects once did unquestioningly. Would that they did again.

fmorrone@nysun.com