The Chimneys

Bettie Fleischmann was born in Cincinnati in March 1871 to Charles and Henriette Fleischmann. In 1892 she married Dr. Christian R. Holmes, a physician who had treated her father. Holmes led Cincinnati's Board of Hospital Commissioners and helped bring about the city's general hospital and the University of Cincinnati medical college campus. He died in 1920, and the Christian R. Holmes Hospital, funded in part by his widow, opened in May 1929. By 1927 Mrs. Holmes had moved to New York full time.

In 1929 she moved into The Chimneys, a newly completed Tudor-style house at Sands Point on the Cow Neck peninsula. Its name comes from its seventeen chimneys. The synagogue that later bought the house dates it to 1926, while a Cincinnati preservation history says it was completed in 1929. The Philadelphia Architects and Buildings database records four pencil drawings for the Holmes residence at Sands Point by the architect Edgar I. Williams, dated 1929 to 1930, which supports Williams as the designer. A 2010 construction report claims the house was built in England in 1926 and moved to Sands Point in 1930, but no other source repeats this. Mrs. Holmes collected art at The Chimneys and died there on September 29, 1941. She was buried beside her husband in the Fleischmann family mausoleum in Cincinnati.

In 1954 the 24.5-acre estate came on the market. A young congregation, The Community Synagogue, which had been meeting in borrowed spaces, moved to buy it, but the Sands Point Village Board imposed restrictions that would have blocked the purchase. The congregation went to court, and the New York Court of Appeals ruled in its favor. W. Averell Harriman, a neighbor who was then running for governor, spoke up for the congregation. Services began at The Chimneys three weeks after the purchase, and the synagogue was formally dedicated on June 1, 1957.

The congregation later added a hexagonal wing for a sanctuary and social hall, designed by the architect Stanley Katz in materials chosen to match the house. A multi-million-dollar expansion completed in 2008 added a learning center, chapel, library and classrooms as an extension of The Chimneys, keeping its historic mural walls and woodwork. The original dining room and entry hall now form a smaller worship space seating 140. The main sanctuary was restored in 2016. The Chimneys is an active synagogue at 160 Middle Neck Road and is not open as a historic house.