Longfellow Park Chapel

As I was curling Maggie's hair for church this morning at 9:30 (Pacific Time) I got a phone call from my younger brother Logan in Boston. He said, "Jillaire, the Longfellow Park Chapel is burning down!" I was stunned.

The Longfellow Park Chapel is the building for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Cambridge, Massachusetts that I attended for four of the five years I lived in Boston. I was there my first Sunday after spending my first few culture-shocked days as a freshman at Boston College. I spent every Sunday there at my church meetings and then stayed after for our weekly dinner. I can still remember my first dinner there. During the fall of my sophomore year, it was at one of those church dinners that I met my future husband. He claims his crush on me began during a ward skit night in that building. After Damon proposed to me in Rockport, MA, we returned to the city and went to the Longfellow Park building for an Institute dinner and a movie night, where we realized we wouldn't be able to conceal our news from all our friends. Wanting to tell my parents first, I used a telephone in the Family History Center upstairs to call my mom and tell her I was engaged.

I remember walking along the cobblestone sidewalks from the Harvard Square T-stop toward the chapel on Brattle Street, just across the road from the historic Henry Wadsworth Longfellow house, the namesake of the grassy area in front of the church and of the chapel itself. I made that walk in heat, humidity, rain, and snow. I made so many friends in that building and had so many spiritual experiences that contributed to my commitment to and faith in the gospel.

This morning Logan told me that he was attending stake conference (a meeting of several wards) in an auditorium at MIT (the Cambridge Stake, created in 1998, has no stake center; they are at least a year away from completing one) when his friend got a text message from a fellow ward member who was attending a closed-circuit broadcast of the meeting at the Longfellow Park Chapel. During the second speaker's talk someone smelled smoke and the fire alarm went off. Soon smoke was pouring from the roof, which eventually collapsed. The windows were blown out, including a circular one in the chapel that was directly behind the stand--essentially the view remembered by those of us who attended sacrament meetings there. Everyone evacuated and there were no reported injuries.

When stake conference was over, Logan and his wife went over to the chapel where there were still 8 to 10 fire trucks fighting the fire. He said the building basically looked gutted. There was water pouring out the front door, down the steps, and into the street. Three wards met in that building, which also housed offices and a library for the Boston Institute of Religion. It is a sad loss for what this building represented of the Church's history in Boston and for what it meant to those of us who attended church there.

In these photos, taken by Logan on his cell phone, the steeple is still standing. I hope they are able to salvage it in a rebuild. The Longfellow building just wouldn't be the same without it.

Here you can see the streams of water pouring onto the roof and steeple from at least 3 ladder trucks. Notice the sky is gray with the smoke.

Here you can see the blown-out frame of the chapel's circular window.

Here is a view of the side and back of the building.

Update: If you want to see video footage of the fire, go here: Fire Video. Here are some aerial photographs taken the day after the fire: Helicopter Photos.

This building was the spiritual home for many of us, who have all been saddened and feel deeply about the loss. Sam Brown, an "alumnus" of this building created an "In Memoriam" webpage to which many have posted their memories of this chapel. As Damon put it, "Even to this day, whenever I read in Mosiah about the waters of Mormon and 'how beautiful they are to the eyes of them who there came to the knowledge of their Redeemer,' I think of that building and how my testimony of Christ, and every other good thing I have now, come from the years I spent there."