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Boston may be known for brick townhouses and cobblestone streets, but the past decade has seen a proliferation of something else: more new skyscrapers than at any other period in the city's history.
The two tallest towers on the city's skyline - 200 Clarendon, formerly known as the John Hancock tower, and the Prudential Tower - have remained the same for the past half century. But the past eight years has brought new third-, fourth- and fifth-tallest towers. The sixth-tallest - the 51-story South Station Tower - is scheduled for completion in 2025.
But after that, the trend may come to a halt. The slowdown in the skyscraper-building craze was already in the works before the pandemic brought major uncertainty to the office real estate sector.
"Real estate, building and development booms are highly cyclical," said Mark Fallon, a director of research and strategy at Hunneman, a real estate analyst firm.
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Boston has more factors that limit the building of tall towers than most cities, Fallon said.
Older buildings - some that date to the 1800s - are common in such neighborhoods as the Back Bay, South End, North End and Beacon Hill, restricting where towers can go. That, combined with strict zoning, means that realistically, there are few areas where towers can go, including downtown or along Back Bay's so-called "high spine," which includes the city's three tallest towers. Just across the harbor, Logan Airport limits building heights in the Seaport - where they're forced to top out at just over 20 stories - as well as downtown.
"It's not a highrise-living city, historically," said Jeff Myers, a research director at the firm Colliers. "In areas like Chicago, New York or Miami, it's been part of the urban fabric for far longer."
The decade from 2016 through 2025, when South Station Tower is due to be complete, will have been the biggest boom time for skyscrapers in the city's long and storied history. Boston added four towers of 200 meters, or 656 feet, in height during this more recent span of time, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Of buildings put up in the past half-century, only 200 Clarendon had reached that level.
A few of those towers were in the works before the tech and life sciences boom made Boston among the country's most prosperous metropolitan areas in the nation. South Station Tower, for example, first sought permitting decades ago. Winthrop Center, which ismoving in its first office tenants this summer, was first pitched by Mayor Tom Menino as a redevelopment project for a rundown city-owned parking garage on Federal Street.
Just before the pandemic, the vacancy rate for top-quality office space was 7.2% - a 20-year low, according to Myers.
"From a fundamental perspective, most of the office space was full, so there was a reason to build more," he said.
Eight of the city's 25 tallest buildings were built in the past decade. That compares to three in the 20-year period from 1990 to 2009. This decade has also included 11 towers of at least 100 meters - more than double that of the previous decade.
In fact, Boston's skyline hadn't undergone much change over a roughly two-decade span from the early 1990s to 2015, when Millennium Tower opened as what was then downtown Boston's new tallest building. The list of the city's 10 tallest buildings remained static from 1987, when downtown's International Place opened, until 2002, when 111 Huntington Ave. broke into the top 10.
Ian Taberner, an architect and faculty member at Boston Architectural College, said that ultimately, Boston will likely never be defined by its skyline. Historic cities like Amsterdam, Rome, Paris or Copenhagen aren't known for their skylines either, he said. Even in New York City, he said that on a recent visit his friends were more excited about street-level attractions in Manhattan like the High Line or Little Island.
"As cities evolve, they've become more like public spaces," Taberner said.
Rick Peiser, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, said he's a fan of 200 Clarendon and the Federal Reserve tower. He also singled out two new towers as notable ones: One Congress, a curved glass tower opening this year near City Hall; and Boston University's 19-story Center for Computing & Data Sciences. The BU building opened last school year and has been nicknamed the Jenga tower for the way its facade juts in and out on different sides.
Peiser contrasted BU's building with other new ones that might not be so architecturally distinct, like South Station Tower.
"It's not going to put Boston on the map in a way that it hasn't already been," Peiser said of South Station Tower, "whereas I think the Jenga building will."
Boston's skyscraper boom is now nearing an end, as a few notable towers that could add to the skyline are stalled for various reasons. A proposed 566-foot tower near Boylston Street and Massachusetts Avenue in the Back Bay is imperiled by infighting between the project's proponents. On the waterfront, a proposed 600-foot tower next to the New England Aquarium has been met with criticism from neighbors, city officials and advocacy groups throughout a series of proposed changes.
In the meantime, towers are still being built - just shorter ones. Much of the new growth will be in neighborhoods like the Seaport, where the proximity to Logan strictly limits buildings to just over 20 stories.
In other cases, locations outside the downtown area come with tougher zoning, while lower lease rates make taller towers less profitable. Projects that have overcome the hurdles include Cambridge Crossing, the Baystate Expo Center site in Dorchester, the former Suffolk Downs site on the East Boston-Revere line, and the former Flower Exchange site in the South End.
Another major factor is the needs of the industry for which many of the new towers are being built: life sciences. Lab buildings typically require higher ceilings than traditional office buildings and residential buildings. Life sciences companies also like broad, sprawling floor areas, which aren't possible in many neighborhoods. Moderna's new Kendall Square headquarters now under construction, for example, stands just six stories high. Two others being built - Takeda Pharmaceuticals' new Kendall Square building and one for AstraZeneca - will both be 16 stories tall.
Lastly, higher interest rates and energy efficiency requirements mean projects that used to be feasible may no longer be, said Fallon, the Hunneman analyst.
"Projects that penciled out at extremely low borrowing costs are now much harder to finance, and coupled with the significant change in demand, that has developers and lenders weary of funding new large-scale office projects at this moment," Fallon said.
"If we were still in an extremely low interest rate environment," he said. "I would expect to see at least some discussions regarding additional skyscrapers being put forth."
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