Old B'nai Zion Temple

The congregation's own story is one of splitting and mending. Orthodox-leaning members left in 1875 to form Emanu El; the two groups rejoined about 1877 under a Reform affiliation sympathetic to tradition. The Cotton and Common Streets temple was dedicated on October 22, 1915, a year after the plaque's date, and the name B'nai Zion followed. Membership peaked at 430 in 1962, six years after the move to a new Southfield Road building. A private foundation bought the old temple in 1993 and 1994, and the Register listed it in 1994.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shreveport Municipal Auditorium — steps away
  The Art Deco hall of 1929 where the Louisiana Hayride went out over KWKH from 1948 to 1960 and where Elvis Presley first played Shreveport on October 16, 1954.
• Spring Street Museum — 0.4 mi
  An 1866 bank building downtown that also held a Freedman's Savings and Trust branch in 1870, now a free LSUS-run museum with a Victorian parlor and the original vault.
• Shreveport Water Works Museum — 0.8 mi
  An 1887 brick pumping station on McNeill Street where Worthington steam pumps ran until 1980, now a free museum and a National Historic Landmark.
• Louisiana State Exhibit Museum — 2.8 mi
  A circular Art Deco museum of 1939 on the Shreveport fairgrounds, with a 1,000-year-old Caddo log boat, rotunda murals and dioramas of early Caddo Parish.

More markers nearby

• Scottish Rite Cathedral — steps away
• Bishop Leonidas Polk — steps away
• Strand Theatre — steps away
• Jefferson Hotel — steps away