Masonic Temple Building
- Architect
- Eben Ezra Roberts
- Style
- Prairie School
- City
- Chicago, IL
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The Masonic Temple Building — also known as the Scoville Block — anchors the corner of Oak Park Avenue and Lake Street in Oak Park, built for C. B. Scoville and designed by Eben Ezra Roberts between 1906 and 1909. It's one of only a handful of commercial buildings executed in the Prairie School style, with Oak Park's Masonic lodges among its first tenants before Gilmore's Department Store occupied the building from 1930 until it closed in the 1970s.
the building
Storefronts and lobby. The ground floor was built for retail, with iron-and-glass storefronts separated from the brick upper stories by a course of limestone. Inside, an oak staircase and a lobby with leaded art-glass windows and marble wainscoting survive from the original construction, and a fourth story was added in 1914.
the style
As one of the few commercial buildings built in the Prairie style rather than the residential form the style is best known for, the Masonic Temple Building shows the vocabulary of horizontal lines and restrained ornament adapted to a retail block.
More on Prairie Schoolsignificance
The building sits within the Ridgeland-Oak Park Historic District and was individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
nearby
- Unity Temple
- George Furbeck House
- Charles E. Roberts Stable
- Harrison P. Young House
- Frank W. Thomas House
- Laura Gale House