Article May 4, 1968 Issue

Christian Science Church Center

PROGRESS REPORT No. 14

A little more than a hundred years ago the land now known as Boston's Back Bay, the area in which The Mother Church is situated, lay largely under water. Washed by the Charles River at high tide, it lay marshy and unsightly at the tide's ebbing.

In 1857, pressed by the city's growing population and its increasing need for home sites, Boston civic leaders decided to fill and reclaim the area. The project took more than twenty years to complete, but the land it yielded became the intellectual, cultural, and religious center of Boston. It was a small parcel of this land that Mrs. Eddy deeded to her followers as the site for The Mother Church.

High buildings erected on soil of this type present special problems. They must be built on foundations that rest on supporting piles, and the piles must be driven through the fill, the water, and the clayey riverbed down into bedrock itself. Low buildings like the Original Mother Church and its Extension, the Publishing House, the present Administration Building, the planned Colonnade and Sunday School Buildings, can be built on short piles, perhaps not more than twenty feet deep. But taller and heavier buildings require deep foundations. The new Administration Building will rest on concrete-filled steel piles nearly half its own height and sunk to hard rock, a depth of 180 feet.

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