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April 6-10, 1975: A Trip to New York City |
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January 19-25, 1975: A Trip to Anchorage, Alaska |
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Return to Index for 1975 |
In March, John Cullinane invited all the employees to come to a cocktail party/company meeting at his new house in Boston, and the Company even had those of us from out-of-town attend. I had been to Boston once before, but did no picture-taking, partly because I was such a new employee.
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The gathering was to be at John Cullinane's house in Brookline on Saturday night, so I flew to Boston late Friday morning. As I left Chicago, I took a couple of pictures from the air, but I was disappointed that they didn't turn out very well, even though we took off straight to the east and went out over the lake just north of Eugenie Square.
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The flight to Boston was a little over two hours, and there was a nice lunch on board, but mostly I worked one of my puzzle books that I like to take with me when I fly.
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The company had made reservations for Ted Hollander and myself at the Sheraton Boston, but when a couple of the Boston guys that I knew picked me up at the airport, we drove out to South Boston to spend some time at one of their houses. I can't quite remember how it worked out, but I and two other guys ended up going and staying on John Cullinane's 45-foot sailboat that was docked at a marina south of town. It was a nice boat, and actually the first time I'd been on a sailboat at all. There was plenty of space for the three of us, and we stayed up late just talking about the company, the work, what Chicago was like, and so on. I slept well on the boat, but I remember that I got just a little seasick since the boat wasn't moving forward, but just tied up at the dock rocking back and forth. Some weather came through that night, and that didn't help. But it was a lot of fun, and in the morning the guys took me downtown to the Sheraton and dropped me off.
I met Ted Hollander at the hotel, but then in late morning decided just to go out and walk around downtown Boston and see some of the sights before returning to the hotel late in the afternoon to get a ride out to John's house for the party.
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At left is a map of the downtown Boston area, and on it I have marked most of the stops I made and locations I photographed.
I began at the Sheraton and walked towards town on Boylston Street. The first major structure I came to was the Prudential Center building; being in its last year of being Boston's tallest, I thought I would head up to the observation floor and see what I could see. From there, I continued up the street past the John Hancock Building, one of Boston's iconic structures.
Further on, I came to Boston Common where the historic Massachusetts State House is located. I walked around the historic area of downtown for a while, stopping in at One Boston Place, where Cullinane's current offices are located. I made a big circle around through an area known as Back Bay- the area to the west of Boston Common, on the south bank of the Charles River. Walking through that area, I found that there was an enclosed lagoon and a strip of parkland between that lagoon and the river itself that offered nice views back at the downtown area. I walked all along this park and exited at its west end, which brought me back close to the Sheraton.
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The Prudential Center is, at the moment, the tallest building in Boston, but that's splitting hairs. The John Hancock Building has topped out, and that makes it taller, but I think that it is not officially complete, which I think means that it doesn't qualify for official lists. But that's splitting hairs. In any event, I don't know if the Hancock Center has an observation floor, or if it would even be open yet, so I'll be getting my city views from the Prudential Tower.
But there are lots of newer tall buildings in Boston now, but these were the two tallest this year. (I have discovered that the building Cullinane's current offices are in is the third tallest in town.
Anyway, I think the aerial view is pretty neat, and I've marked the locations I'll refer to during the first part of my walk today.
So I walked the block up Boylston Street to the Prudential Tower, went in the lobby, found the desk for the entry to the observation floor, paid the small fee, and headed up in the special elevator to that floor.
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The Prudential Tower, known colloquially as The Pru, is an International Style skyscraper built for Prudential Insurance in 1964. The building is 749 feet tall, with 52 floors. There's a restaurant on the 52nd floor, and the observation deck is on the 50th floor (called the "Skywalk Obbservatory"). (I did find out that I was right in that there will be an observation deck in the John Hancock Center and that it will be a bit higher, but it isn't open yet.)
The Prudential Tower began construction in 1960 with the steel structure; when it was completed in 1964 it was actually, believe it or not, the tallest building in the world outside of New York City! Eventually, it spurred insurance rival John Hancock to build the nearby John Hancock Tower, which is slightly taller at 790 feet.
When it was built, the Prudential Tower received mostly positive architectural reviews. The New York Times called it "the showcase of the New Boston [representing] the agony and the ecstasy of a city striving to rise above the sordidness of its recent past".
That was nice, but the people that didn't like the building really didn't like it. Read what two architecture critics had to say:
| "...a flashy 52-story glass and aluminum tower...an over-scaled megalomaniac structure shockingly unrelated to the city's size, standards, or style. It is a slick developer's model dropped into an urban renewal slot in Anycity, U.S.A.— a textbook example of urban character assassination." |
| "...an energetically ugly, square shaft that offends the Boston skyline more than any other structure." |
Kind of makes you wonder if the old saying "any publicity is good publicity" is really true. Anyway, here are my pictures from "the top of the Pru":
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Just down below me to the southeast, I took a picture of an interesting new building. It turned out to be an apartment building at 117 Huntington Street- very upscale, I am told. I took two other pictures looking east to the downtown core, and it turned out they overlapped each other well enough that I could combine them together into a panoramic view:
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From "the Pru" I continued along Boylston Street, and I could see the John Hancock Tower ahead of me- a 60-story, 790-foot skyscraper. The tower was designed by I. M. Pei & Partners and is essentially complete. On its official completion date, it will become the tallest building in New England. John Hancock Insurance is the main tenant of the building.
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A major concern of the architects while designing the tower was its proximity to Boston's Trinity Church, a prominent National Historic Landmark. Their concern led them to redesign the tower's plans, as there was a public outcry when it was revealed that the Hancock Tower would cast its shadow on the church.
But the much-anticipated landmark was known in the 1970s for its engineering flaws as well as for its architectural achievement. The opening of the building has been delayed for five years, and the total cost has more than doubled. The building has become an embarrassment for I. M. Pei, for modernist architects, and for the architecture industry.
First, the temporary steel retaining walls erected to facilitate the construction of the building's foundation warped, giving way to the clay and mud fill of the Back Bay which they were supposed to hold back. The inward bend of the retaining walls damaged utility lines, the sidewalk pavement, and nearby buildings— including the historic Trinity Church across St. James Avenue. Trinity Church won an $11 million lawsuit to pay for repairs.
There were also problems with the innovative use of blue reflective glass in a steel tower; entire 4' × 11', 500-lb windowpanes detached from the building and crashed to the sidewalk hundreds of feet below. Police closed off surrounding streets whenever winds reached 45 mph. Years-long, extensive testing not only raised questions about the structural integrity of the entire building (due to unanticipated twisting of the structure), but also found that wind-caused oscillation and thermal stresses inside the window sandwich panels were causing them to fail. Beginning in 1973, all 10,344 window panes were replaced with a different design (at a cost of some $7 million).
During the many months it took to diagnose and repair the building, sheets of plywood replaced many of the missing glass windows of the building, earning it the nickname "Plywood Palace". Further, the building's upper-floor occupants suffered from motion sickness when the building swayed in the wind. To stabilize the movement, contractors installed a tuned mass damper (consisting of two, 300-ton weights) on the 58th floor.
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(Picture at left) Continuing along from the Prudential Tower, I headed northeast, and here, along Boylston Street, is the new John Hancock building.
(Picture at right)
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According to testing records, engineers discovered that— despite the mass damper— the building could have fallen over under a certain kind of wind loading. The structure was assessed as more unstable on its narrow sides than on the big flat sides. Some 1,500 tons of diagonal steel bracing, costing $5 million, were added to prevent such an event. Due to all these problems, the offical opening date of the building, even though some tenants had already moved in, has not yet been finalized.
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After its former site on Summer Street burned in the Great Boston Fire of 1872, the current church complex was erected under the direction of Rector Phillips Brooks (1835–1893), one of the best-known and most charismatic preachers of his time.
The church and parish house were designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and construction took place from 1872 to 1877, when the complex was consecrated. Situated on Copley Square in Back Bay, Trinity Church is the building that established Richardson's reputation. It is the birthplace and archetype of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, characterized by a clay roof, polychromy, rough stone, heavy arches, and a massive tower. This style was soon adopted for a number of public buildings across the United States. The stone used was Dedham Granite.
According to L.C. Norton, the inventor of door checks, the heavy main entrance doors of Trinity Church were the first to be fitted with a quiet and effective means to resist slamming. This led to a patented pneumatic door check that was seen throughout the 1880s to 1910s. Norton's door check device would eventually evolve into the modern door closer. The building's plan is a modified Greek Cross with four arms extending outwards from the central tower, which stands 211 feet tall. Having been built in Boston's Back Bay, which was originally a mud flat, Trinity rests on some 4,500 wooden piles, each driven through 30 feet of gravel fill, silt, and clay, and constantly wetted by the water table of the Back Bay.
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Members of the congregation have included Samuel Adams, William Dawes, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Sewall, and Phillis Wheatley. In 1773, Samuel Adams gave the signals from the Old South Meeting House for the "war whoops" that started the Boston Tea Party. A century later, the church strongly supported the Union cause. Since the Civil War, the church has been committed to an urban ministry, and its congregation has become increasingly diverse by race, class, and sexual orientation. The congregation has formally adopted a platform of equality, social justice, and peace.
The current church building was designed between 1870 and 1872 by the Boston architectural firm of Cummings and Sears in the Venetian Gothic style. The style follows the precepts of the British cultural theorist and architectural critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) as outlined in his treatise The Stones of Venice. Old South Church remains one of the most significant examples of Ruskin's influence on American architecture. The exterior of the church is primarily built of Roxbury Conglomerate commonly called puddingstone. Many arches, and several walls of stone are striped with alternating courses of yellow-beige and deep red sandstone. The porticos and large open arches in the campanile are decorated with simple plate tracery. The upper arches of the porticos are decorated with screens of ornate wrought iron. The building is roofed in alternating bands of red and dark gray slate and the roofline finished with ornamental iron cresting.
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You can see the Common, of course, and I've also marked Back Bay again and the Massachusetts State House. I will also be stopping by the Cullinane offices is One Boston Place, so I've marked that, and I have also marked a building not present in 1976 but which is now Boston's fourth tallest building- Millennium Tower.
Boston Common (also known as the Common) is the central public park in downtown Boston. Dating from 1634, it is the oldest city park in the United States. The Boston Common consists of 50 acres of land bounded by Tremont Street, Park Street, Beacon Street, Charles Street, and Boylston Street.
Boston Common has been, and is still, the center of public life in the city. From its earliest days as a cow pasture, through an encampment during the Revolutionary War and the place where public hangings were carried out, to modern times where all kinds of public events, including Boston's largest demonstration (1969, when 100,000 people gathered to protest the Vietnam War), and Boston's largest outdoor concert (Judy Garland, 110,000 people in 1967) have been held.
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The building sits on 7 acres of land once owned by John Hancock, Massachusetts's first elected governor. The Masonic cornerstone ceremony took place on July 4, 1795, with Paul Revere, Deputy Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, presiding. For the building's design, architect Charles Bulfinch used two London buildings- Somerset House and the Pantheon. And when Maine separated from Massachusetts and became an independent state in 1820, Bulfinch modeled their capitol on this one. The Commonwealth completed a major expansion of the original building in 1895, and the east and west wings were added in 1917.
I continued up Tremont Street past Park Street and the State House, and then, on my left, passed a cemetery- which turned out to be one of the most historic sites I saw today.
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The cemetery's Egyptian revival gate and fence were designed by architect Isaiah Rogers (1800–1869). The need for the site arose because the land set aside for the city's first cemetery— King's Chapel Burying Ground, located a block east— was insufficient to meet the city's growing population. The area was known as the South Burying Ground until 1737, at which point it took on the name of the granary building which stood on the site of the present-day Park Street Church. In May 1830, trees were planted in the area and an attempt was made to change the name to "Franklin Cemetery" to honor the family of Benjamin Franklin, but the effort failed.
The Burying Ground was originally part of the Boston Common, which then encompassed the entire block. The southwest portion of the block was taken for public buildings two years after the cemetery was established, which included the Granary and a house of correction, and the north portion of the block was used for housing.
I don't particularly know why, exactly, I wanted to see the current Cullinane office. I did know that the company would be moving to new offices out in the suburbs that would be big enough to handle the growing number of employees, but still I thought it would be nice to see where it began. So I took a couple of pictures of the building, One Boston Place from the outside, and was pleasantly surprised that the building was open so I could actually get inside and up to our offices.
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From One Boston Place I just continued to wander through the downtown area, uncovering old colonial buildings nestled among the new buildings and skyscrapers. I understand there is a whole self-guided tour that you can take from one historic site to another, and I wish I had time to do that.
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The building has an illustrious history. From its construction until Independence, it was the Massachusetts Town House- the seat of colony government, housing the Royal Governor and various court chambers. In 1761, James Otis argued against the Writs of Assistance in the Royal Council Chamber. Though he lost the case, Otis influenced public opinion in a way that contributed to the American Revolution; John Adams later wrote of that speech, "Then and there ... the child independence was born."
From 1776 to 1798, it was the Massachusetts State House- the state capitol. From 1798 until 1881, the building was used commercially, save for the period from 1830-1841 when it was Boston's City Hall. In 1881, in response to plans for the possible demolition of the building due to real estate potential, The Bostonian Society was formed to preserve and steward the Old State House. Since then, the building has been maintained by the society, and the museum inside is part of the Freedom Walk.
I can't resist adding here that a little over a year from now, on the occasion of the United States' Bicentennial, Queen Elizabeth will visit this building and give a short speech from its balcony. That speech will say, in part:
| "If Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, and other patriots could have known that one day a British monarch would stand on the balcony of the Old State House, from which the Declaration of Independence was first read to the people of Boston, and be greeted in such kind and generous words ..... well, I think they would have been extremely surprised! But perhaps they would also have been pleased to know that eventually we came together again as free peoples and friends to defend together the very ideals for which the American Revolution was fought." |
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My picture at right shows the ultra-modern, new, Boston City Hall. This enormous, imposing, and brutalist building dominates the area. The structure was designed by Kallmann McKinnell Woods and built in the 1960s as part of Boston's first large Urban Renewal scheme. While considered by some to have architectural merit, the building is not universally admired, and is sharply unpopular among locals. Furthermore, it is resented for having replaced the Victorian architecture of Boston's Scollay Square, a lively commercial district that lapsed into squalor in the twentieth century.
Also in my picture in the background is the Custom House Tower- a skyscraper in McKinley Square, in the Financial District neighborhood. The original building was constructed in 1837-47 and was designed by Ammi Burnham Young in the Greek Revival style, and the tower was added in 1913-15. The building is part of the Custom House District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Standing 496 feet tall, it was Boston's tallest building prior to the completion of The Pru.
I'd seen so much of the downtown area that I thought it would be interesting to see a more residential area, so I next walked west to the area known as Back Bay, which, as it turned out, was street after street lined with old brownstone residences. It reminded me of the Near North area of Chicago because of its proximity to downtown.
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I walked over to Storrow Drive, which is the thorofare that runs along the south side of the Charles River, and took one of the footbridges across to Charles River Park. From here there were some good views:
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After all my walking around, I found myself back close to the Sheraton, right on time, as I had about an hour before Ted and I would get picked up to be taken out to John Cullinane's house and our gathering.
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The party at John's house, which was the whole purpose of the trip, was really neat, and I got to meet just about everyone in the company, the vast majority of them for the first time. I also got to see a lot of Boston, my first time walking around the city. I suspect I will be back here frequently- at least as long as I work for a company headquartered here.
When I left Boston the next day to return to Chicago, I took one picture from the plane looking north at downtown Boston.
You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.
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April 6-10, 1975: A Trip to New York City |
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January 19-25, 1975: A Trip to Anchorage, Alaska |
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Return to Index for 1975 |
