Winthrop Center | 115 Winthrop Square | Financial District

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atlantaden said:
Damn, that's some beautiful lighting on the United Shoe Machinery Building, shows it's decorative gold top perfectly! The old John Hancock at one time had amazing lighting like this building, why it's not lit up anymore is a mystery!
Click to expand...
Per your friend and mine, AI (sarcasm):

The dramatic "uplighting" of the Berkeley Building's entire facade (the Old John Hancock) was a special architectural feature introduced in the early 2000s that has since been discontinued for a combination of environmental and economic reasons.

The full building illumination you remember changed due to:
  • Lights Out Boston (2008): To protect migrating birds, Boston joined the Lights Outinitiative. This program encourages building owners to turn off non-essential architectural lighting—especially uplighting that shines into the sky—during peak migration seasons (Spring and Fall).
  • Energy Conservation: In the mid-2000s, as energy costs rose and corporate "green" initiatives became standard, many building owners, including Beacon Capital Partners(who owned the building at the time), significantly reduced or eliminated decorative exterior floodlighting to cut costs and carbon footprints.
  • Maintenance & Obsolescence: The original high-intensity discharge (HID) floodlights used for that uplighting were expensive to maintain and energy-intensive. Many of these older systems were simply allowed to phase out rather than being replaced with modern LEDs.

So, basically if they wanted to install energy efficient lighting systems, a la the Pru and every new tower with lit-up crowns in town, they could. Odd that when they went to the trouble of installing the former Fenway Park John Hancock sign on the ziggurat they didn't fold full-tower LED uplighting into the project.
 
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