At Webster and Filbert, a Victorian house wears a roofline unlike anything else in the city: a cluster of towers including a double-bulbed Bengali dome, a castellated European turret, and a Shiva-temple spire. The Vedanta Society Old Temple, built in stages beginning in 1905, was the first Hindu temple in the Western world.
Swami Trigunatita, who oversaw the design, intended the competing domes as an argument in architecture: all religions reaching toward the same point. The building survived the 1906 earthquake months after opening, which the congregation took as a good omen.
The society moved its main services to a newer temple nearby in 1959, but the Old Temple still stands, restored, and opens for occasional services and tours. The exterior, which is the spectacle, works at any hour. It sits one block downhill from the ridge route, between Lafayette Park and the Octagon House.
