Retrofits Unseen
John Hancock Tower, 1968 - present
For the past fifty years, the John Hancock Tower in Boston has struck a commanding and sometimes hazardous presence in the city's skyline.1 Commanding because it is by far the tallest thing in its immediate vicinity, and also because many major roads into town have this way of pointing straight on axis at it. It’s as if the tower were there first and all along, a timeless and ancient obelisk around which the city was laid.
Hazardous because during construction, dozens of its huge windows fell off, raining glass and chaos down upon the streets below. The leftover openings in the walls were temporarily replaced with that great staple of building construction: sheets of plywood. For a little while, back in the 70’s, it was not the mighty Hancock Tower. It was "The Plywood Palace".2
The mighty Hancock Tower! After construction began in 1968, it was completed at last in 1976, with new windows that stayed put. Yet her stories still resound today, far and wide across Boston society! From high perched executive board rooms ("in the 08 crash, the building sold for half the buyer paid for it!"), to the Boston Duck Boat tours growling through the old city below ("this skyscraper on your left was swaying like a balloon until they put 600 tons of steel on the 58th floor! Some say it still sways on windy days…time to work from home!") Every Bostonian knows it was once peppered with plywood. From a famous Columbia business school case study on distressed debt investing, every east coast business school student knows the hundreds of millions it lost and made in a few short years.3 And mark my words: Architects LOVE this building. So, they might be interested to know a thing or two about what the MBAs know. Since it was those ‘08-era mega deals that ultimately created the conditions for a spectacular renovation whereby seven contiguous floors in the building were connected with a lengthy atrium stair.
Its soaring blue rhomboid shape a major presence throughout Boston, it has many stories to tell.
Designed by architect Harry Cobb of the world renowned firm I.M. Pei and Partners, the nearly two million square foot tower was defined by a tricky design problem. How could such a humongous building coexist with its historic neighbors, Copley Square and the magnificent 1877 Trinity Church? In a design move extremely unique for an office skyscraper, the shape of the tower was angled and stretched from one corner of the block to the other to minimize its vast girth as seen from church and square. The architects took a “minimalist approach" that "disembodied its mass", adding a notch on the skinny side to emphasize its "weightless verticality".4 The resulting form is skinny on two sides, fat on the others, looks magically flat from certain angles, and is clad entirely with a very blue glass that reflects the ever changing New England sky.
Its other stories are perhaps even more striking than its design. Writing what would become a Pulitzer winning piece on the building in 1995, architecture critic Robert Campbell uncovered some incredible tales about the its construction in a Boston Globe article titled “Builder Faced Bigger Crisis than Falling Windows.”5 In it, Campbell divides the early history of the Hancock Tower into four dramatic “mini-chapters” which can be summarized briefly as follows:
Foundation excavation problems: Digging the hole for the tower’s monstrous foundations caused nearby buildings — including the precious Trinity Church — to settle and crack. It cost millions of dollars to repair everything.
Swaying in wind problems: The upper floors of the building swayed too much for comfort, so 600 tons of steel plates were installed on the 58th floor to dampen the movement. (This also cost millions of dollars.)
Window problems: There was a major fault with how the original window panels were made. Expansion and contraction with temperature swings caused glass panes to crack off the building, shattering on the streets below. Fortunately there were no major injuries (although other sources indicate there were some minor ones).6 All original windows were replaced with a different kind of window that wouldn’t fail. (Again, millions. Of note: the window manufacturer was at fault, not the architects.)
Possible tipping over: Presumably because of the mounting public concern over the general integrity of the building, an additional structural analysis was commissioned. Swiss engineer Bruno Thürlimann was engaged as an outside expert. Unfortunately, he concluded the entire building was at risk of falling down. Curiously, the tipping risk wasn’t because the building was too skinny (the way a piece of paper, if held up vertically, would flop over), but because the building was too wide. If it were to sway sideways in a strong wind, his findings concluded, the movement risked snowballing out of control because there would be too much weight dangerously far off of center. Fortunately, the building was able to be structurally reinforced with additional bracing (more millions).
According to Campbell, it’s now one of the safest high-rises in the world, having been subject to so much scrutiny.7
Whoa! And even more intriguing that the potentially catastrophic structural issue and its subsequent remediation was basically hidden to all outside a small circle around the construction team, in this most prominent and tallest of towers in The City of Champions.8 So let’s turn inward then, because some things have happened since Campbell’s 1995 article that form a kind of appendix to his mini-series. Let’s call it Chapter 5. Unlike the first four, this one doesn’t flirt with death and catastrophe. It’s a more hopeful chapter, one of ingenuity unseen to the outside world and flourishing of human connections. You may enjoy it nonetheless!
Hancock Tower Chapter 5: Interconnecting Stairs
The scene is established in those tipsy years before the 2008 Financial Crisis. A brief overview:
In December 2006, a New York based real estate fund called Broadway Partners buys a collection of Boston buildings including the Hancock Tower. The tower itself took two loans: a mortgage and a mezzanine loan totaling $1.36 billion.9
Markets crash. Nationwide, residential real estate shows serious signs of stress in 2007, but commercial craters too when Lehman fails in 2008. Tenants leave, rents fall, and Broadway Partners is in trouble with its gargantuan loans.
Investors Normandy Real Estate Partners and Five Mile Capital see a potential opportunity in Broadway’s weakness. They start buying the mezzanine debt.
Broadway Partners defaults on its Hancock Tower debt in January 2009. (Reflecting on this era, one lawyer, blogger, and tenant of the tower tower wrote, “Each night, beginning at dusk, you can watch as large bands of dark space begin to stripe the building’s tenanted floors – the outward scars of rolling leases that were never replaced…”10)
Normandy and Five Mile buy the building for $660 million in March 2009. Half of what Broadway paid for it less than three years prior. The saga and the “loan-to-own” strategy is the basis for what has become a notable case study on the building at Columbia Business School.11
Less than two years later, Normandy and Five Mile sell the building to Boston Properties for $930 million. “An epic conclusion for an iconic landmark,” a Normandy founding partner tells The New York Times.12
It’s clear from news articles at the time that while Normandy and Five Mile certainly had the luck of good market timing on their side, they also invested in physical improvements to attract higher profile tenants. This included things like a new basement parking garage and lobby renovations. This would pay off by attracting major anchor tenants like Boston private equity giant Bain Capital, who signed a lease for seven contiguous floors in the spring of 2010.
But Normandy and Five Mile’s investments in physical improvements to the Hancock Tower were just the beginning of its interior transformations. Since 2010, nearly 2,000 building permits have been pulled for 200 Clarendon Street (The Hancock Tower’s address).13 One of the more interesting permit records is ALT43504:
Saw cut floor slab openings on select floors; install structural steel and associated stair components for an interconnecting staircase on floors 36 - 43; construct temporary rated floor opening protection walls around all new floor openings - Bain Capital space.
Bain Capital didn’t simply move in to the Hancock Tower, they punched a long open-atrium stair connecting all seven of their newly leased floors together. An impressive technical feat in any existing building; even moreso here given the tower’s narrow floor plate and already decorated history of structural retrofits.
Indeed, the post financial crash years have enjoyed a slew of interconnecting stair projects in the Hancock Tower. Eight of them to-date, according to publicly available permit data. The rest aren’t as spectacularly long as the Bain Cap. stair — likely because stringent fire suppression technology is required by code to floor openings with three or more contiguous openings — but each are surely luxurious in their own little way.
Why so many stairs, when the building already has ample emergency exit stairs and 21 elevators? Three reasons. They’re related, and the third one is the best.
The building’s form gives it relatively narrow floor plates, making each floor smaller compared to a more traditional wider office building. So larger companies are more likely to need multiple floors here.
Fire stair doors are often locked (from the inside of course) on upper building floors and are rather utilitarian. (Not conducive to spontaneous meeting, as open stairs are.)
It’s a prestigious building with highly successful tenants. These companies believe (rightly) in the thesis that success comes from proximity and interconnectedness of people, ideas, and information. For as British economist Alfred Marshall once wrote:
Great are the advantages which people following the same skilled trade get from near neighborhood to one another. The mysteries of the trade become no mystery; but are as it were in the air…14
Demystify today…in the Hancock Tower’s interconnecting stairs! They lower the barrier to the exchanging of minds. Easily worth the millions in steel and sprinkler rearrangements, when billions in hedge funds are at stake.
Long a soaring and stable fixture of Boston’s skyline now and forevermore, beneath the shiny sheets of glass of the Hancock Tower lies not a trace of monumental permanence. Ceaselessly carved, stabilized, permitted, and strung together once again, its insides are a plastic world, evolving, hacked, at nearly the breakneck pace of the capital markets her tenants so seek to dominate.
Thoughts, questions, comments? Send me a note: jamescarrico@substack.com.
All text, photos, and diagrams in article ©James Carrico unless otherwise cited.
Technically it’s now called “200 Clarendon”, but let’s be frank. Naming buildings after addresses is terribly uninspiring and everyone in Boston will call this the Hancock tower forever, exactly like how Chicago’s “Willis Tower” is always Sears Tower.
Grant Spencer. Photograph: “The Plywood Palace”, 1974, in reference to a 1973 article in Esquire, “Boston’s big pain in the glass,” by Gerry Nadel. Boston Magazine. Link
Sagalyn, L., & Uzmez, Y. (2010). “Distressed Debt Investing: The Hancock Tower & Garage.” Columbia Business School - Case Study. Published by CaseWorks. Link
Campbell, Robert. “Builder Faced Bigger Crisis than Falling Windows.” Boston Globe. March 3, 1995. Link
Associated Press. “Two Injured as Glass Falls From John Hancock Tower.” The New York Times. July 26, 1974. Link
Campbell, 1995.
Sharma, Aashish. ““Title-Town" --- How Boston Became the City of Champions (Part 1: Patriots)”. Bleacher Report. July 2, 2011. Link
Clark, Matt. “Sale of Hancock Tower Completes Distressed Debt Turnaround.” Crunched Credit. October 14, 2010. Link
Bagli, Charles V. “John Hancock Tower Sells for $930 Million.” The New York Times. sec. DealBook. December 29th, 2010. Link
Based on data provided by propertyrecs.com. Accessed December 8th, 2024.
Marshall, Alfred. Principles of Economics. 1890