{"nrhp_refnum":"82001970","name":"Prospect Congregational Church","other_names":[],"category":"building","location":{"address":"99 Prospect St.","address_restricted":false,"city":"Cambridge","county":"Middlesex County","state":"MA","lat":42.36787434800004,"lon":-71.10277072999997,"geom_source":"nps_gis"},"listed_date":"1982-04-13","is_nhl":false,"nhl_designated_date":null,"areas_of_significance":["Architecture"],"significance_levels":["state"],"summary":{"what_it_is":"A brick church at 99 Prospect Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, built in 1851 to designs by architect Alexander R. Esty. It follows the traditional New England meetinghouse form with Norman and Romanesque detail.","why_significant":"The nomination argues the church is architecturally unique for using Norman/Romanesque details many years before H. H. Richardson popularized the style. It keeps the form of a traditional New England church, a long gabled box with a projecting four-story entrance pavilion, while adding round-headed windows and carved ornament. Reviewers judged it locally significant for architecture.","narrative":"Prospect Congregational Church, at 99 Prospect Street in Cambridge, is a brick church completed in 1851 and still used for worship. Boston architect Alexander R. Esty gave it the familiar shape of a New England meetinghouse: a long rectangular box under a gable roof with a projecting four-story entrance pavilion. He then added Norman and Romanesque ornament, including round-headed windows decorated with carved zigzag patterns, colonnettes and capitals. Such details appeared here many years before Henry Hobson Richardson made the style popular, and mid-nineteenth-century American architects knew medieval Romanesque only as decoration rather than as a structural system. In 1879 architect Thomas Silloway extended the parish hall at the rear. The church was built for the growing population of mid-Cambridge, though its congregation has always looked toward Cambridgeport, where it began as the Evangelical Congregational Society of Cambridgeport. Reviewers recognized it as locally significant for its early use of Romanesque Revival ornament.","period_of_significance":null,"architect_builder":"Alexander R. Esty (architect); Thomas Silloway (architect of 1879 parish hall extension)","architectural_style":"Traditional northeast meetinghouse form with Norman and Romanesque detail","criteria":["C"],"status_note":"Present use is religious structure (church); the form states it is unaltered and unmoved.","vacant_flag":false,"machine_generated":true,"model":"claude-sonnet-5-5","prompt_version":"v1.0-2026-10-29","generated_at":"2026-10-29 02:11:53.755931-05","source_pdf":"https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/14/7913/63791314/content/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_MA/82001970.pdf"},"photo":{"url_800":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/82001970/5e5f63a4c9-800.webp","url_1600":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/82001970/5e5f63a4c9-1600.webp","licence":"Public domain","author":"Swampyank me","credit_html":"<a href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christ_the_King.JPG\" rel=\"noopener\">Swampyank me</a>, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons","source_page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christ_the_King.JPG"},"district":null,"sources":{"nps_snapshot_date":"2026-05-22","nara_catalog":"https://catalog.archives.gov/id/63791314","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_the_King_Presbyterian_Church","wikidata":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5108986"},"indexable":true,"url":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/massachusetts/middlesex-county/prospect-congregational-church-82001970/"}