Originally built as a synagogue for the Oheb Shalom Reform congregation, Eutaw Place Temple served a German Jewish immigrant community in the Bolton Hill neighborhood. It was the second grand Renaissance Revival synagogue built in the vicinity just after Baltimore Hebrew Congregation Synagogue opened a few blocks away (1890–1891, Charles L. Carson; now Berea Temple Seventh-Day Adventist). In this period upper-class members of the Jewish community were moving uptown from East Baltimore, away from newer Eastern European and Russian Jewish immigrants. This change was facilitated by the development of streetcar lines and new residential construction around Druid Hill Park.
Sperry designed an impressive building sheathed in rusticated white Beaver Dam marble from Baltimore County. Synagogue history holds that the design was modeled on the Great Synagogue of Florence, Italy. A grand red tile dome sits on a tall copper drum at the center, with smaller matching domes on the corner towers at the entrance. The Moorish-inspired interior accommodated approximately two thousand worshippers in a bright open space with a second-floor balcony around three sides. In 1960 the property was sold to the Prince Hall Grand Lodge, Maryland’s premier African American Masonic Lodge, which counted Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and musician Eubie Blake among its members.