Marsh Chapel

Plans for a riverside chapel at the university were made as early as 1920, when the university purchased the 15-acre (0.061 km²) Charles River Campus and commissioned a master plan from architect Ralph Adams Cram. Originally, the chapel was to be complemented by the Alexander Graham Bell tower, a Gothic Revival administrative structure named for the inventor of the telephone and other innovations.

The chapel was not constructed until after the Great Depression and Second World War. Ralph Adams Cram was selected as its architect. He designed the building in the Gothic style. The building was dedicated in 1950. Because of competition from Modernist and other architectural influences, the chapel marked the end of a period of Collegiate Gothic construction on American campuses.

The chapel was the site of the Marsh Chapel Experiment on Good Friday in 1962. Researchers studying human thought included Walter Pahnke; Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor and later psychedelic guru; and Richard Alpert (who would later become known as Ram Dass).

Between 1953 and 1965, African-American theologian Howard Thurman presided the chapel as its dean. Thurman exerted an enormous influence on the work of Civil Rights Movement leader Martin Luther King Jr., who studied at Boston University.

• Robert Cummings Neville, one of the Boston Confucians, served as a dean of the chapel