By Tom Meek
Friday, December 5, 2025
The restored lighting at the Christian Science Reading Room on Church Street in Cambridge’s Harvard Square.
A burst of brightness came to a gloomy stretch of Church Street last month as the Christian Science Reading Room restored soft white art deco lighting absent from the building’s facade for decades.
The lights returned to Church Street, across from the long-dormant AMC Loews Harvard Square, at a Nov. 7 unveiling. Pictures of the alluring illumination have become a slow-trending wave on local social media.
“Now when you see it, it catches your eye,” said Jason Fredette of Poyant Signs, the New Bedford company that restored the lighting over nine months. “The building looks totally different.”
The first structure at the site was a blacksmith shop in the late 1800s, later a veterinary practice. That became mixed retail at the turn of the century as Harvard Square became more thickly settled and the subway arrived in 1912, said Cambridge Historical Commission executive director Charles Sullivan. The 23 Church St. structure was razed in favor of the current one-story 1936 art deco design by architect William Laurence Galvin as a new, upscale home for Cambridge Gas and Electric Light Co.
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