Nowhere in the world is there a larger Masonic temple than the one you face. Completed in 1926 and designed by George Mason, this immense Gothic limestone fortress holds more than a thousand rooms across fourteen floors, including multiple ritual chambers, ballrooms, a drill hall, and a three-thousand-seat theater that hosts concerts and Broadway tours today. The cornerstone was laid in 1922 using the same trowel George Washington had used to set the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol.
The Masons built it at the height of the fraternal order's popularity, when lodges were central to American civic and social life. Legend holds that architect Mason lost his fortune in the building and that his ghost haunts the halls, a tale the theater leans into at Halloween. The scale is almost medieval.
Picture the sheer cliff of carved stone rising above Cass Park, turrets and pointed windows climbing skyward, a cathedral built not for a church but for a brotherhood of builders.