Temple Emmanuel’s property includes a courtyard fronting Cary Avenue and Gardner Street and a two-wing building. An 1859 wing fronts Tudor Street, and an 1872 addition fronts Cary Avenue. An enclosed corridor with an entrance on Tudor Street joins these two structures. The building has two front-gabled roofs, one fronting Cary Avenue and the other fronting Tudor Street, adjoined by a sloped roof over a connecting corridor.

The Cary Avenue building has an asymmetrical cuboid tower with a pyramidal roof, an enclosed entry vestibule with a paired gable roof, two side-wall dormers, and ten two-story arched stained glass windows. Their mullions articulate paired arched windows with a round window above. The Tudor Street building has flared eaves, a shallow central tower, an entry porch, and a large central rosette window above the entry porch.

Today, the building’s 1859 wing houses the Temple’s social hall. Its two-story Romanesque windows and barrel-vaulted ceiling are emblematic of the Italianate architecture popular in mid-nineteenth-century religious buildings’ design. The 1872 sanctuary’s rib vaulted ceiling, decorative pilasters, polychrome slate-clad roof pattern, and slate-clad turret hip roof typify many mid to late nineteenth-century religious buildings’ eclectic combinations of Italianate and Queen Anne architectural styles. The Temple’s Cary Avenue glass entry doors and cuboid tower, created by eliminating the church steeple, reflect Mid-Twentieth-Century Modern design.

In 1859, Chelsea’s Second Baptist Church completed the Cary Square structure currently housing Temple Emmanuel’s sanctuary and Jewish Chelsea Museum. The Baptists erected a significant addition to their original Cary Square building in 1872. In 1904, a Methodist Episcopal congregation in Chelsea purchased the Second Baptist Church’s Cary Square property. The Methodists ceased operations in 1939, four years after Congregation Beth El, a Chelsea Jewish community prayer group, purchased the Methodists’ Cary Square property. That same year, the newly housed Jewish congregation re-named itself Temple Emmanuel of Chelsea.

Three distinctive design and decorative styles chronicle the Cary Square property’s mideighteenth to mid-twentieth century evolution as a spiritual haven, initially for Victorian Baptists, later for Edwardian Methodist Episcopals, and finally for Mid-Twentieth Century Conservative Jews. The social hall’s high, balconied pulpit and the sanctuary’s massive pipe organ, names-engraved bronze memorial plaques, and names-embossed arched windows signify noteworthy transitions in Temple Emmanuel’s rich, diverse architectural and cultural history.