Winthrop Center | 115 Winthrop Square | Financial District

Has anyone noticed that at night, the lighting on the "skinny" sides of the building is much more faint and less bright than on the fatter sides? Also, I think it's more noticeable because the skinny sides only have 2 slats that are lit up, whereas the wider sides have 8-10 slats. I guess this is a boring observation, but has anyone else noticed that?
 
dotdude78 said:
Has anyone noticed that at night, the lighting on the "skinny" sides of the building is much more faint and less bright than on the fatter sides? Also, I think it's more noticeable because the skinny sides only have 2 slats that are lit up, whereas the wider sides have 8-10 slats. I guess this is a boring observation, but has anyone else noticed that?
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huh.

I was downtown last night and didn't notice that, no.

These are from April (posted a few pages back), but they don't seem to suggest any lesser degree of brightness on the skinny side.

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I walked around here on Wednesday. It's nothing spectacular, but two things could change my mind:
  • I want to see how "The Connector" works for retail and general urban activity/people watching.
  • I want to see how the fountain turns out on the Winthrop Park side.
I had lunch at COSI next door to Winthrop Center, and I was disappointed the plaza fountain wasn't working. That's always such a nice little urban oasis in the city, similar to Post Office Square Park.

I was going to post some photos, but @SomervilleRed photos are better than mine! :)
 
Re: Pics above...I don't see this angle everyday as I live north of the city, but the skyline really lucked out by not having that chunky side wing extend the length of the building. Probably the only good to come from COVID.
 
kz1000ps said:
As a skyline element, this thing has gone from zero to background filler in near-record time. Almost walked away from this spot not noticing it in the slightest.

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I think that's really a matter of the spot it's viewed from. It's not filler from Dewey Square, as has been documented extensively in this thread, and I wouldn't say it's filler from anywhere north of Downtown.
 
I saw this image from some website marketing the views from Winthrop Square tower. I wonder if the new tenants will complain about the "other" Millennium tower that has no promised roof element. LOL

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Brookline-ish said:
Re: Pics above...I don't see this angle everyday as I live north of the city, but the skyline really lucked out by not having that chunky side wing extend the length of the building. Probably the only good to come from COVID.
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1000%
 
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“This week, a Millennium Partners affiliate closed on its first penthouse in the Winthrop Center tower. But while everyone can agree it's on the tower's top floor, there's room for debate over which floor number it is.
The $14.1 million sale to Boston-area buyers, whom the developer declined to identify, is for a condo billed as being on the 62nd floor. As it happens, that's a higher number than any other residence in Boston. One Dalton in Back Bay — which is taller than Winthrop Center — tops out at 61 floors. Just down the street at Millennium Tower, the top floor is labelled the 60th.
Yet if anyone were to stand on Franklin Street and count the number of floors from the ground up on Winthrop Center tower, they wouldn't get to 62. That’s because, in reality, Winthrop Center has 53 floors.
The fact reveals a truth about luxury residential towers: When it comes to tallying up their stories, the math has a way of getting fuzzy.
It's a phenomenon that's not unique to Boston. In New York City, where luxury skyscrapers are a dime (OK, more like $10 million) a dozen, residential real estate developers often count more floors than their towers actually have. One justification is that that their soaring lobbies or ground-level retail stores are much taller than a typical floor, so they count as more than one floor. (Donald Trump is sometimes credited as coming up with this idea.) The number that developers and landlords assign to a floor, they say, corresponds to its height.
But the practice is less known in Boston, likely because the city didn’t have residential skyscrapers until a few years ago. That changed when Millennium Tower opened in 2016, with the developer advertising it as 60 stories high. That was followed by developer Dick Friedman opening One Dalton in 2019, with 61 stories. Winthrop Center debuted this spring at 62 stories.
One likely motivation? “It’s bragging rights,” said Sue Hawkes, managing director at The Collaborative Companies, a Boston-based firm that specializes in marketing high-end condo and apartment buildings.
Richard Baumert, principal at Millennium Partners’ Boston affiliate, explained in an interview with the Boston Business Journal that there’s nothing disingenuous about how the stories are numbered, pointing to how floor count is handled in New York and elsewhere. Winthrop is a mixed-use building, with a 60-foot-tall lobby of its own. The building’s residences start roughly 350 feet in the air. If a typical floor is about 10 feet high, he said, it makes sense to call it the 35th story.
“It’s very common,” Baumert said. “We’re doing it more to reflect the true elevation from ground level — from where you are when you’re standing on that floor.”
The offices just below Winthrop’s residences top out on the 26th floor, however. Baumert said the floor number is often less relevant to office tenants.
Millennium used a similar rationale for Millennium Tower, which actually has 53 stories, but is billed as having 60.
One Dalton is marketed as having 61 stories and, according to a spokesperson for Friedman’s firm, Carpenter & Co., it does indeed have 61 floor slabs at or above grade. However, the city building permit for One Dalton from 2015 lists 58 stories, a fact the spokesperson was unable to explain. The building has six floors that are occupied only by mechanical equipment or used for storage, she said.
But then there's the superstition stuff.
Winthrop Center does not have a floor called the 44th floor, because in China the number four can be considered unlucky. (It sounds similar to the word for death.) One Dalton does not have a fourth floor, or for similar reasons, a 13th floor. Winthrop’s residences start on the 35th floor, so an unlucky 13 is not an issue, though the office part of the building does have a 13th floor.
Superstitions aside, Hawkes said that when it comes to purchasing a sky-high home, most buyers care most about their views, not the number they press on an elevator.
“The only time I think it matters to a consumer, in a real sense, is if there’s a difference between what the height (actually) is and what it’s labeled as,” Hawkes said.
Whether they call their new home a 62nd-story condo, a 53rd-floor flat, or something else entirely, the owners of the Winthrop penthouse will live atop a building that reaches almost 700 feet in the air, taller than any other building in the Financial District.
However, they won’t be the only ones: Millennium still has to close on five other units on the top floor.”
 
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