Congregation Emanu-El's landmark San Francisco synagogue is the subject of this albumen stereoview, published by Carleton Watkins under his celebrated Pacific Coast series. The view is attributed to Watkins with confidence, as the orange-bordered mount bears his imprint reading "Watkins' Pacific Coast" with his gallery address listed as 26 Montgomery Street, opposite Lick House entrance, San Francisco. The photograph dates to the 1870s, when Watkins was producing his most commercially successful architectural and landscape work in California.

The facade of the synagogue dominates both frames, presenting its twin Moorish Revival towers crowned with distinctive onion domes, tall arched windows arranged in vertical bays across the nave, and an arched entrance portal at street level. A white picket fence runs along the foreground street, gas lamp posts are visible at the curb, and neighboring Victorian residences and hillside buildings populate the middle distance behind the structure.

Congregation Emanu-El, founded in 1850 as the first Jewish congregation in San Francisco, completed this building at Sutter and Powell Streets in 1866. The Moorish Revival design made it one of the most architecturally distinctive religious structures in nineteenth-century San Francisco; it was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire.

The mount front reads "Synagogue Emanuel, San Francisco." with series number 786 printed at lower right. A penciled notation reading "50d" appears at upper left of the pink reverse.