Stand here for a moment and imagine a building of columns, stone, and deliberate ambition. The Masonic Temple that once stood on this corner opened in nineteen oh eight in the Classical Revival style, a design language borrowed from ancient Greece and Rome to suggest order, dignity, and permanence. Riverside’s Masons, a fraternal brotherhood built around ritual, charity, and mutual loyalty, chose that look very intentionally. In nineteen oh five, their committee said they wanted the “chaste beauties of the classic orders” to project prestige and influence in the heart of the city.
If you glance at the image in the app, you can see the sort of commanding presence they wanted here: balanced, formal, and very sure of itself. Architect Franklin P. Burnham, a Chicago-born designer who had worked on the Georgia State Capitol, drew this temple while he was also designing the Riverside County Courthouse across the street. He meant the temple, the courthouse, and the neighboring Women’s Clubhouse to work together as one grand civic corridor.
The story began before the building did. One account says Evergreen Masonic Lodge Number two hundred fifty-nine formed in August of eighteen ninety-seven in the home of civil engineer C. C. Miller. The lodge itself insisted its roots reached back to eighteen seventy-nine, and there is good reason to believe them. Members carefully preserved ceremonial pillars bought in eighteen ninety-two for eighty-three dollars and fifty cents, about three thousand dollars today, and later moved them into this very temple. Early members included S. C. Evans Senior and Junior, founders of the Riverside Land and Irrigation Company. One devoted Mason, Kingsbury Sanborn, became Master at just thirty-one and later left his entire estate to the lodge when he died in nineteen forty-seven.
By nineteen oh three, the lodge paid four thousand dollars, roughly one hundred forty thousand today, for this prized corner at Eleventh and Main. Members donated almost all of the final construction cost, twenty-one thousand eight hundred seventy-two dollars, or roughly three quarters of a million today. When they laid the cornerstone on the twentieth of February, nineteen oh eight, the Riverside Military Band played. Yet behind the grand facade, the interior began rather plainly: no elevator, and at first no electric lights, so evening ceremonies relied on older forms of illumination.
A postcard view on your screen hints at the temple’s busy downtown life. In the nineteen twenties, membership surged so fast that Evergreen often held three degree ceremonies in one meeting, plus extra Saturday sessions. In nineteen twenty-six, it helped create Riverside Lodge to ease the crush. The two groups shared this increasingly crowded home until the Masons moved out in nineteen fifty-five, when Riverside County bought the building.
Then came the melancholy turn. The temple entered the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty, but the county still demolished it in nineteen eighty-eight to make way for the Hall of Justice, breaking Burnham’s carefully planned architectural corridor. One fragment survived: the cornerstone had already been removed in nineteen seventy-six and taken to Evergreen Lodge’s newer home.
Its absence may be the most eloquent thing about this place. If you are curious, the lodge that preserves this legacy keeps very limited hours, opening only on Wednesday evenings from six to eight thirty. From that absence, move onward to Main Street Pedestrian Mall, where civic ambition gave way to everyday commerce.
