![]() ![]() This empire included most of the buildings around New York's Penn Station, such as the 1,700-room Hotel Pennsylvania and the Manhattan Mall Chicago's Merchandise Mart, at 3.6 million square feet one of the world's largest buildings and San Francisco's three-tower Bank of America Center. There was little to stop him.Ī self-made billionaire, Roth chaired one of the nation's largest real estate investment trusts, Vornado Realty, the owner and manager of more than 100 million square feet of commercial and retail space. Steve Roth had a reputation for speaking his mind. That such a remarkable challenge is even before him, as well as before developer Millennium Partners and the City of Boston, is itself remarkable.Ī rendering of Millennium Tower's penthouse. The tower is the one gigantic- by Boston standards, its height is huge-catalyst that is supposed to remake one of America's oldest neighborhoods, while also, as Middleton pointed out, preserving its character. The Millennium Tower, where contracts have started to go out to buyers, is supposed to change that, according to its champions in the real estate industry, City Hall, and the business community. At dusk, though, the noise quiets the traffic on the streets and sidewalks thins Downtown Crossing goes to bed. Downtown Crossing as a neighborhood-densely built, frustratingly narrow in a lot of places, its street grid forever indentured to centuries of planning and re-planning-is mostly busy during the daytime business hours. A plaque outside declared the store "the Hub of the universe," a spin off of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s nickname for the Massachusetts State House, a nickname that Bostonians eventually embraced for their entire city.įilene's is gone now. (Burnham, an architect and urban planner, also designed New York's Flatiron Building and Washington's Union Station.)įor a time, Filene's was a Boston attraction on par with Fenway Park or Faneuil Hall. The 1912 opening of the Filene's department store flagship, designed in a grand Beaux Arts style by Daniel Burnham, cemented that reputation. The area is one of the oldest established neighborhoods in the United States, with roots in the 17th century and an identity as Boston's retail center stretching back to at least the late 19th. In fact, that might be an understatement. It is rising in the neighborhood known as Downtown Crossing, which Middleton is correct in calling historic. The condo-and-retail tower, which should be completed this year and opened by the summer of 2016, looms large, even as a construction exoskeleton. "And particularly into an historic city center?" "How do you fit a tower of this complexity and magnitude into a very narrow and tight urban site?" Middleton, a partner in Manhattan-based Handel Architects, asked. On a chilly, damp afternoon in December, architect Blake Middleton stood diagonally across the street from his latest downtown Boston creation, the under-construction Millennium Tower, and explained the particular challenge the 685-foot skyscraper posed. ![]()
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