27 Chestnut Street Apartments (Boston University Divinity School Chapel)

Near the top end of a street of consistently brick row houses, many of them the work of housewrights Cornelius Coolidge, Jesse Shaw, or Hezekiah Stoddard, emerges a limestone Gothic Revival surprise. Boston University began on Beacon Hill and migrated across the city in new and converted buildings such as this one. The Divinity School built this chapel in 1917–1918 to complement their teaching facilities nearby at 70–72 Mount Vernon Street (BH21), to which it was originally connected. Despite the prominent Gothic windows and buttresses, the facade respects the building height of its older brick neighbors and enriches, rather than detracts from, the overall context. In 1965, Bullerjahn Associates adaptively reused both this chapel and the former Boston University classroom building on Mount Vernon Street for condominiums. To the left of the former chapel, 29A Chestnut Street (1800) is perhaps the first house constructed for the Mount Vernon Proprietors, the developers of this section of Beacon Hill, The side entrance indicates that gardens once surrounded the house; the street-front bow was added in 1818.