Mormons begin new Cambridge building

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- the Mormons -- this morning broke ground on a $20 million stake center (architectural rendering above), which will house several congregations and a regional office, in East Cambridge.

About 150 people gathered under sunny skies on an asphalt parking lot at the corner of Rogers and Second streets, an industrial area where it seems like another biotech company is constructing a new building every day. There were a series of prayers and songs and a trumpet solo, and then various LDS and local dignitaries took turns turning over shovelfuls of dirt in a box that had been installed on top of the asphalt for the ceremony.

The building, which will front on Binney Street, will be significantly smaller than the Mormon temple that looms over Route 2 in Belmont, but will be larger than the meeting houses that Mormons use for regular worship (there are LDS meeting houses in Belmont, Boston, Cambridge, Lynnfield and Revere, among other places). Unlike the Belmont Temple, which was the subject of litigation, and a proposed meetinghouse in Brookline, which is being held up by neighborhood opposition, the Cambridge project has been moving more smoothly, apparently because most of the neighbors are non-residential, and because the brick-clad building, despite its steeple, will be smaller than many of the new biotech buildings in the area.

Grant Bennett, a longtime LDS leader locally, told me that the actual construction is scheduled to begin Wednesday, and that the target completion date is February 2010. He said the building will house four congregations -- two of which worship in English, one in Spanish, and one in Portuguese -- that now meet in rented spaces in East Cambridge and Somerville. The building will also have office space for the stake president -- a Mormon stake is a geographic unit roughly akin to a diocese in Catholicism -- and will also have a full-size basketball court for recreational use. (The Cambridge Stake, which will be headquartered in the new building, has 4,000 members who worship in 14 congregations, called wards and branches, in Arlington, Belmont, Cambridge, Lynn, Lynnfield, Revere and Somerville). The chapel in the building will be able to house 250 to 300 worshipers, but can also be expanded into the basketball court for regional meetings, with a potential capacity of 1,200 people.

At the groundbreaking I ran into Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Harvard history professor who, by dint of her status as a "university professor" at Harvard (not to mention her Pulitzer and her MacArthur "genius" grant) is one of the most prominent Mormons in academia. Ulrich is a member of one of the congregations that for the last five years has been worshipping in the former Kendall Boiler and Tank Building around the corner; she said the local congregations are a mix of academics, young professionals, and recent immigrants. She said the church's decision to build the stake center in East Cambridge reflects what appears to be a trend in Mormonism in the U.S. -- at least in the Northeast -- in which the predominantly suburban church is investing more in urban areas.

"This development expresses the church's commitment to the urban core,'' said Ulrich, who said the church has also recently constructed a new facility in Harlem. "It tends to be a suburban thing, and to commit this money to an urban center and to maintaining members here is significant.''

(Architectural rendering above by Burt,Hill.)