Arlington Street Church

The Arlington Street Church is recognizable by its one hundred and ninety foot steeple and its exterior of New Jersey brownstone, modeled after the London church of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields. Dedicated in eighteen sixty-one, it was the first public building constructed on the landfill that became Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. To support its weight on the marshy ground, builders drove nine hundred and ninety-nine wooden piles into the mud beneath the foundation.