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LinkThe Globe said:60 stories and countless tales
By Thomas Farragher, Globe Staff | September 24, 2006
It is all grown up now. Aloof yet alluring. Tall and graceful. An icon, forever blue, at the dawn of middle age.
The John Hancock tower turns 30 this week. Looming 60 stories over the Back Bay, it was once assailed as a skyline monster, an ill-mannered interloper in buttoned-down Copley Square.
Today, the city that checks its reflection in the tower's signature skin has largely dismissed its ugly past as an amusing piece of local lore, like the Bambino's curse or Curley's chicanery at City Hall. Few can summon an image of Boston without it -- or would want to.
But as New England's tallest building marks its birthday, it is in the midst of metamorphosis, no longer the address of choice for one of the city's mightiest post-war powers.
By year's end, the last vestiges of what once had been the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company -- acquired in 2003 by a Canadian conglomerate -- will be gone, its boardroom dismantled, its infirmary, its legions of porters and matrons, its in-house squadron of barbers and dentists now quaint corporate memories.
A monument to power is now a monument to a departed power. And, for Boston, a sign of what comes next.
``In ancient Venice, the reason they built San Marco Square was to tell the peasants that this was a very powerful place," said David D'Alessandro, Hancock's former chief executive. ``They were symbols that you were dealing with very important, powerful people if you enter this place."
That's surely what Hancock had in mind when the first shovel went into the ground in the summer of 1968. What its new owners and tenants see in it is also something grand, but different.
The penthouse offices that once were the domain of its chief executives are being taken over by the 21st century's financial titans -- hedge fund managers and private equity groups who savor the very profitable privacy of their handsome suites of blond wood, gray granite, and chrome.
The building complex, which sold for $910 million three years ago, is for sale again and is expected to command far more than $1 billion this time.
It is, as one of its longtime tenants puts it, a ``money building" now.
The man who designed the tower didn't intend for there to be a gap between its bold architectural statement and the more-circumscribed aspirations of the businesses inside. But, in a way, he is happy it turned out that way.
Henry N. Cobb, who completed the Hancock's conceptual design over two frenetic weeks in the fall of 1967, hasn't climbed to the tower's upper floors in 22 years. He hasn't walked into its lobby since he abruptly walked out more than a decade ago. Its interior look had been ``wrecked," he said.
``The last time I was in it, I was so disgusted that I just turned on my heel and walked out," said Cobb, a founding partner of I.M. Pei's fabled New York firm. ``In that sense I'm happy that the external statement of the building is so completely independent of what happens inside it, which normally I wouldn't like."
If Cobb is acutely sensitive about what has happened to his creation, the scars left by the tower's troubled early history help explain why.
He remembers sitting at the building's dedication 30 years ago this Friday as his work went without mention -- either on the steel plaque in the lobby or in the speakers' remarks.
And he remembers the storm he provoked by having the temerity to conceive a building that would cast its angular shadow upon the sandstone and granite masterpiece that is Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church.
Just days before construction began in earnest, as the tempest strengthened, Cobb's father died. As the architect walked toward the still barren building site, he was intercepted by an old family friend -- a church vestryman -- who offered a qualified condolence.
``Your father was such a fine man," the friend told Cobb. And then, gesturing to the construction zone across the street, he added sharply: ``How could his son have done such a thing?"
A troubled birth
With New England transfixed by the Red Sox's epic pennant race in the summer of 1967, John Hancock quietly made a decision that would forever alter the city skyline.
The insurance company no longer wanted to house its corporate headquarters in the building it had planned -- a cylindrical tower with a conventional concrete skin. It wanted something bigger, more efficient, and less costly. And it wanted it fast -- by Thanksgiving. ``We were unhappy with our client," Cobb said. ``We were not terribly pleased with those marching orders."
But, in his office in New York, he went back to work. In two weeks, the vision of a 790-foot tower of mirrored glass took shape -- one that would boldly challenge the architectural commandment that tall buildings shalt not cloud Copley Square or crowd Trinity Church.
``That was the conventional wisdom: That it was impossible to build a tall building next to a monument," Cobb explained. ``And I would say that the most important insight that we had -- that I had -- with which not one single architect in Boston agreed at the time, was that, in fact, the opposite was true. That if you wanted to achieve a sympathetic relationship between these two buildings, you should bring them closer together."
And so the rhomboid building was placed along a diagonal, catercornered to the street. It was an oblique but striking gesture of respect for its surroundings -- a gesture lost, to say the least, on early reviewers.
``An outrage," proclaimed Edward Logue, then Boston's renewal chief.
``A monster," said John Burchard, dean of humanities at MIT.
``We had hoped, in this time of urban unrest, for something other than an egotistical monument," the Boston Society of Architects concluded.
By Aug. 28, 1968, one week after the ceremonial groundbreaking, it was time for the Gilbane Building Co. of Providence to transform Cobb's drawings into a glass-and-steel tower. It would not be easy.
The fill used to form the Back Bay in the mid-1800s was unstable and difficult to excavate, falling in on itself as construction crews dug up 500 million pounds of earth. Streets buckled. Utility lines ruptured. Trinity was severely damaged.
And that was just the start. At ground level, the tower created an umbrella-shattering, pedestrian-scattering wind-tunnel effect. Inside, the sensation was unsettling as well. In high winds, the building would sway as much as 3 feet off center, enough to make occupants on upper floors sick or dizzy. The fix was the installation, on the 58th floor, of two 300-ton lead weights encased in bright orange steel boxes and placed at opposite ends of the building. The $3 million system -- called tuned mass dampers -- is triggered by computer, moving the weights along a lubricated slide in the opposite direction of the wind, neutralizing the effect.
If the building's wind dance was an assault on comfort, Cobb needed to assure himself that its structural integrity was beyond reproach. For that, he reached out to Bruno Thurlimann, a pre eminent engineer in Switzerland, for whom Cobb's 1975 distress signal is still fresh.
``He said, `We are in trouble, Bruno. Can you come over?' " Thurlimann recalled.
What Thurlimann found was startling: The tower was in danger of toppling over -- not along its broad side but on its narrow spine, the thin face it shows to Copley Square.
``We told them the tower needed stiffening," Thurlimann said in a telephone interview from Zurich. ``In the case of very heavy winds, it would have been possible" for it to fall down.
Builders installed 1,500 tons of steel braces along the walls of the inner core that houses its elevator banks and lavatories -- a $5 million investment.
And then, to top it off, the windows were falling out, scarring the building's elegant exterior with pockmarks of plywood.
The glass tower's troubles became part of the region's pop culture. It was mocked on radio talk shows as the Woodpecker Palace. Window monitors, hired to watch the building through binoculars from the sidewalks below, handed broken fragments from fallen panes to tourists.
And Cobb decided to preserve a part of it, too. His daughters were then 18, 13, and 10. From a Harvard Square boutique, he bought each of them a T-shirt and one for himself that he later had framed.
It depicts a giant woodpecker, sporting a plume of outlandish red feathers, nibbling away at an upper corner of the boarded-up tower.
Beneath the cartoonish skyline, the bold red legend underneath reads: ``Ply in the Sky."
The people behind the glass
Before ironworkers hoisted the final 36-foot steel I-beam into place to top off the tower in September 1971, it was painted white and placed in the lobby of the old Hancock building, where employees scrawled their names across it for posterity.
Jack Glancy, then a young man from Lowell fresh from a stint in the Air Force, signed it. And, today, as the building's security director, Glancy can point to the precise place where the I-beam rests in the top northeast corner.
``I've been here so long," Glancy said amid remodeling clutter on the 60th floor. ``It's like my home."
Like many in the small battalion of employees who have watched the tower evolve, Glancy is a student of life in a vertical community.
He once drove and provided armed protection for Gerhard D. Bleicken , Hancock's former chairman and chief executive officer, and for Bleicken's family, accompanying them to Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Hawaii. Not a bad gig, he said. ``People came to work for John Hancock and they had a job for life," said Glancy, now 59. ``That's the way it was."
They were people like Joseph F. Marco, the building's chief electrician, a mountain of a man who played Santa Claus in the building for 25 years before his knees gave out -- a gruff teddy-bear personality who could easily discern between the suits who wouldn't deign to speak to a blue-collar worker and those who took the time to thank him for keeping the lights on.
Marco, who grew up in Charlestown, was around when the gales of the Blizzard of `78 severely tested the tuned mass dampers. And on a rare day off in August 1992, he left strict instructions for his staff before leaving for a golfing outing: ``Don't call me unless the building's on fire."
He was on the ninth tee when his cellphone rang.
``I'm off today," he snapped. ``Well, we've got a fire in the building," the caller replied.
Brian Reynolds remembers that fire, an electrical blaze on the seventh floor that injured dozens and forced the evacuation of 3,000. Since March 30, 1981 -- he remembers it as the day President Reagan was shot -- Reynolds has run the building's spotless loading dock on the ground floor and has not missed any of the tower's milestones -- large or small.
He has coaxed a pig onto an elevator, helping one top executive play a practical joke on another. He's made acquaintance with a courier who used to play jazz with Miles Davis. And he's chatted with a screenwriter considering setting a sitcom on a loading dock just like his.
``I'm on top of the world here," said Reynolds, 48, of Medford, who climbs to the top of the tower's stairwell for exercise three times a week. ``I feel like the captain of a large ship."
Like Reynolds, whose father worked for John Hancock for 38 years, Marty Costello is the second generation of his family to begin a professional career beneath the Hancock logo. From his post in a high-tech control room buried in the basement of the complex, Costello scans a bank of flat-screen computer monitors, looking for hot spots and cool spots in offices above.
An intense mid summer sun beats down on the building's southwest corner, and with the click of a mouse, he orders cooler air from massive chillers high up in the tower's mechanical rooms.
``You get some people, you know, I call them thermostatically challenged," Costello said with a chuckle.
But like the other men and women who make the tower work, Costello calls his work in it a career capstone. ``I was very proud to come to work here," the son of a Hancock porter said. ``Still am."
And then Costello, scanning a new meteorological report, attends to a hallowed Hancock tradition.
He checks three simple electrical switches on the wall, making sure their signal to the weather beacon on the old Hancock building across the street is true. And it is: Steady blue, clear view.
A home to power
Few men have tracked the rhythms of the Hancock tower as intimately as David D'Alessandro and Jack Connors. The trajectories of their careers as insurance executive and advertising mogul seem etched in its mirrored glass.
When Connors moved his firm -- Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos -- onto the 39th floor on Jan. 4, 1980, his company took out full-page newspaper ads carrying the bold headline, ``God bless America," and a jubilant message that was unmistakable: We've made it!
``We weren't afraid of anything," Connors said. ``We were in the tallest building in New England. We could see forever."
When D'Alessandro moved in four years later, on June 25, 1984, the new Hancock vice president was accustomed to the bustle of New York, and he was more than a little taken aback by the tower's sedate corporate culture.
There was a cardiologist on staff and a 26-bed infirmary. Workers were paid in cash from a cart pushed by a payroll employee. The company had its own dental clinic, barbershop, and company store that sold clothes and cosmetics at a considerable loss.
``People were taking naps between noon and two," D'Alessandro recalled. ``They'd go downstairs and say they were tired, and they had quiet nap rooms for them. I'm serious. And I was like, `What, are you kidding me?' "
Neither D'Alessandro nor Connors had time for naps. But there was plenty of time for mischief.
It was D'Alessandro who sent the pig into Connors's office to lampoon an advertising campaign that the Hancock executive felt had fallen especially flat. Over the years, the men have, in turn, filled each other's offices with balloons, dispatched a duo of singing elves, and set up an inflatable swimming pool inside an office suite.
Connors's company made money writing ads for Wang Computers, Dunkin' Donuts, The Boston Globe, and, among others, John Hancock itself. D'Alessandro shepherded his company through years of growth, then demutualization, and ultimately its sale to Toronto's Manulife Financial Corp.
``It was financially the right thing to do," D'Alessandro said. ``But it's a bit like selling your house and then renting it. It never felt like it was ours after that."
By the end of this year, the former Hancock company will occupy not a single square foot in the tower that bears its name -- and will, by contract, continue to do so, D'Alessandro said.
By the end of 2008, Jack Connors's ad company will be gone, too.
Its new president and chief executive, Mike Sheehan, said it's time for the company to write its next chapter somewhere else. ``It's become a money building," said Sheehan from his office down the hall from Connors on the 39th floor. ``And I think it's important for the people in our business to be about ideas and to also be closer to customers."
By the time his company moves out, Connors, who retires at the end of this year, will already have moved up.
Next February, he moves into a suite of offices on the 60th floor, and will run his philanthropic ventures from the space that was the tower's observation deck.
``So as Alzheimer's kicks in, I'll at least remember how to get to work," he said. ``Kind of neat."
The next generation
Jack Deary was a graduate student at MIT when the Hancock tower's windows were falling out. The son of a Boston contractor, he had worked all around the world by the time Beacon Capital Properties LLC bought the tower complex 3 1/2 years ago for nearly $1 billion and asked him to manage it.
Deary wishes Cobb could see what they've done to the place, pouring more than $1 million into the complex's lobbies, removing the carpeting Hancock had placed over its stone floors, and restoring the luster that had been dulled over the years. Like the architectural societies that now regard the tower not as a monster, but a masterpiece, Deary and his staff say the building's allure -- as money managers supplant insurance executives -- has never been stronger.
``What you have now are very successful, young, financial professionals," he said. ``There's probably half a dozen tenants who have trading floors -- they're actually up there trading on stock markets around the world. They're very sophisticated business people. So this is a whole new type of person for this building."
On a brilliant day on the last day in July, a smartly dressed squadron of tenants moved into stunning new quarters on the tower's 56th floor. The new home of TA Associates Inc., a private equity company relocated from the Financial District, is a gleaming expanse of polished wood and glass that does nothing to obstruct the hundred-mile views.
``What this building really offers us is the ability to be a Boston firm," said Bill Sherman, who supervised the move and has since retired as a firm vice president. ``You want to create energy. And this is the kind of environment that I think you can do that in."
Down the hall, amid the bubble wrap and the plastic orange moving crates, Tiffany Taylor, a staff accountant and recent Boston University graduate, agrees.
Beyond the windows at her desk, the red seats of Fenway Park glisten in the near distance, Mount Wachusett stands rugged on the horizon, and Taylor sees what Jack Connors saw on that winter day he arrived, 26 years ago.
``I talked to my parents and I said: `This isn't someplace that I'm supposed to be working when I'm 23. I'm not supposed to have a view like this," Taylor said. ``It's the sort of place that for the rest of my life I'll always compare it to this desk and this view.
``And nothing will compare."
Thomas Farragher's e-mail address is farragher@globe.com
Lots of multimeda slideshows on the main page of Boston.com currently.
