Click here for past issues of the Globe Magazine, dating back to June 22, 1997

Letters to the Magazine editor:
Mail can be sent to Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe, P.O. Box 2378, Boston, MA 02107-2378. The email address is [email protected] or use our form.

Temple Place

It happens all the time. A building looks as if it's built for the ages, but it enjoys only a brief life before being casually trashed for something newer. The Masonic Temple, which dominates the older photo, was built in 1832 by Isaiah Rogers, architect of the Old Howard theater and of First Church Unitarian in Harvard Square. The temple stood on Tremont Street at Temple Place, to which it gave its name. At first, it was a significant building. Ralph Waldo Emerson's lectures there helped boost him to cultural stardom. Eccentric philosopher Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May, ran the Temple School for Children on an upper story.

A magazine of the era called the temple "one of the chief architectural ornaments of the city." But in truth, for all its soaring stone, the temple was a klutzy exercise in the Gothic Revival style. The Masons occupied it for only 25 years, then sold it to the federal government, which converted it into a courthouse. Federal judges had the unpopular task, in abolitionist Boston, of enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law. Up to then, the judges had been sharing space with state courts, but now they needed a courthouse of their own to protect them from outraged citizens. In 1883, when the feds moved out, the temple became the R. H. Stearns department store. Stearns demolished the temple in 1909, replacing it with a new Stearns store, the handsome building we see in the new photo. Stearns closed in 1977, and the building now houses shops and apartments. A city is like a time-lapse film: Almost everything in it is always changing.

To the left, in both photos, is something that hasn't changed: St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral of 1823, designed by the famed Alexander Parris, architect of Quincy Market. The triangular pediment above the Ionic columns was supposed to be carved by Parris's assistant, Solomon Willard, with a low relief of "St. Paul Before Agrippa" (Agrippa being the Roman ruler who heard Paul's appeal in cp9.5AD cp10.560). Budget cuts killed the carving, leaving the row of mysterious flat slabs we still see there today. "Dark, gloomy, and peculiar," says one 19th-century guidebook about St. Paul's. A more recent guide praises its "stern, radiant rationality." Take your pick.