60 State Street | |
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General information | |
Type | Office |
Location | 60 State Street, Boston, Massachusetts |
Coordinates | 42°21′33″N71°03′23″W / 42.35903°N 71.05646°W |
Completed | 1977 |
Height | |
Roof | 509 ft (155 m) |
Technical details | |
Floor count | 38 |
Floor area | 823,009 sq ft (76,460.0 m2) [1] |
Design and construction | |
Architect(s) | Skidmore, Owings & Merrill |
Developer | EQ Office |
60 State Street is a modern skyscraper on historic State Street in the Government Center neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. Completed in 1977, it is Boston's 19th tallest building, standing 509 feet (155 m) tall, and housing 38 floors [usurped] .
Sixty State Street marks the site of one of two colonial taverns named the Great Britain Coffee-House, where Queen Street (now Court Street) ended and King Street (now State Street) began. This Great Britain Coffee-House, established in 1713, advertised "superfine bohea, and green tea, chocolate, coffee-powder, etc." [2]
In 1838, Thatcher Magoun Sr., a ship designer, builder and merchant who ran a shipbuilding facility in Medford, established Thatcher Magoun & Son, a counting-house, on the 60 State Street site to manage his business revenue, bookkeeping and correspondence. [3] This helped to establish State Street as one of Boston's financial centers, thus initiating the city's Financial District. His son and grandson, Thatcher Magoun Jr. and Thatcher Magoun III, kept the firm going in the maritime trade until the late 1870s. An abstract from the firm's records reads:
Upon Magoun Sr.'s death at 81 in 1856, the Thatcher Magoun, a clipper ship built by Hayden & Cudworth in Medford for Thatcher Magoun & Sons, was named and launched in his memory. Author Hall Gleason described the clipper as follows: "Her figurehead was a life-like image of the father of ship building on the Mystic... She made five passages from Boston to S.F., the fastest being 113 days and the slowest 152 days; seven from N.Y. to S.F., fastest 117 and slowest 149; two from Liverpool in 150 and 115 days. The average of the fourteen is 128.7 days. S.F. to NY. in 96 days in 1869." [5]
Designed by the Chicago-based firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and developed by Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, 60 State Street is clad in pink granite to blend in with the red brick of Faneuil Hall, City Hall Plaza and other neighboring buildings and spaces. The granite-clad triangular pillars alternate with vertical banks of rectangular floor-to-ceiling windows in a pattern similar to that of Eero Saarinen's black granite-faced CBS Building, a.k.a. "Black Rock," in New York City. [6]
Also like Black Rock, 60 State Street is surrounded by a pedestrian plaza; the plaza is raised rather than sunken and is accessible at street level from State Street and by two flights of stairs from Faneuil Hall Marketplace.
Unlike Black Rock's rectangular solid composition, 60 State Street was given eleven sides and a two-part scheme so that it has the appearance of side-by-side octagonal tubes from a distance. [7] The chamfered corner pillars are similarly octagonal. This theme recalls Boston's historic architectural motif of chamfered bay windows on Beacon Hill and in the Back Bay.
The main office of a major international law firm, WilmerHale, is located at 60 State Street.
The building is shared with Good Measures and is the corporate headquarters for the company. The building also served as the corporate headquarters of the Sheraton Hotel group from 1978 until they were acquired by Starwood Hotels and Resorts in 1998.
The State Room is located in the building's elegant space on the 33rd floor, the site of the former Bay Tower Room restaurant. The State Room run by Longwood Venues hosts private functions (such as weddings, corporate events) and offers panoramic views of Boston Harbor, the Financial District, Boston Common, the Massachusetts State House, the Charles River and the Mystic River. [8] In 2009, the American Idol Preliminary round for Boston was held here.
A Bank of America branch is at street level, with ATMs located at the intersection of Congress Street and State Street, where Boston's Financial District begins. Next to Bank of America, there is a Headhouse for Blue and Orange Line. Berkshire Bank announced 60 State Street as their new corporate headquarters in late 2017. [9]
To the rear of 60 State facing Congress Street, adjacent to the Faneuil Hall building and statue of Samuel Adams sits a Samuel Adams Beer Tap room on the building's ground level. [10]
Charlestown is the oldest neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. Also called Mishawum by the Massachusett, it is located on a peninsula north of the Charles River, across from downtown Boston, and also adjoins the Mystic River and Boston Harbor waterways. Charlestown was laid out in 1629 by engineer Thomas Graves, one of its earliest settlers, during the reign of Charles I of England. It was originally a separate town and the first capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Government Center is an area in downtown Boston, centered on City Hall Plaza. Formerly the site of Scollay Square, it is now the location of Boston City Hall, courthouses, state and federal office buildings, and a major MBTA subway station, also called Government Center. Its development was controversial, as the project displaced thousands of residents and razed several hundred homes and businesses.
Faneuil Hall is a marketplace and meeting hall located near the waterfront and today's Government Center, in Boston, Massachusetts. Opened in 1742, it was the site of several speeches by Samuel Adams, James Otis, and others encouraging independence from Great Britain. It is now part of Boston National Historical Park and a well-known stop on the Freedom Trail. It is sometimes referred to as "the Cradle of Liberty", though the building and location have ties to slavery.
The Financial District of Boston is located in Downtown Boston, near Government Center and Chinatown.
Henry Tuke co-founded with his father, William Tuke, the Retreat asylum in York, England, a humane alternative to the nineteenth-century network of asyla, based on Quaker principles.
Quincy Market is a historic building near Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. It was constructed between 1824 and 1826 and named in honor of mayor Josiah Quincy, who organized its construction without any tax or debt. The market is a designated National Historic Landmark and a designated Boston Landmark in 1996, significant as one of the largest market complexes built in the United States in the first half of the 19th century. According to the National Park Service, some of Boston's early slave auctions took place near what is now Quincy Market.
William Adams Delano was an American architect and a partner with Chester Holmes Aldrich in the firm of Delano & Aldrich. The firm worked in the Beaux-Arts tradition for elite clients in New York City, Long Island and elsewhere, building townhouses, country houses, clubs, banks and buildings for colleges and private schools. Moving on from the classical and baroque Beaux-Arts repertory, they often designed in the neo-Georgian and neo-Federal styles, and many of their buildings were clad in brick with limestone or white marble trim, a combination which came to be their trademark.
Asher Benjamin was an American architect and author whose work transitioned between Federal architecture and the later Greek Revival architecture. His seven handbooks on design deeply influenced the look of cities and towns throughout New England until the Civil War. Builders also copied his plans in the Midwest and in the South.
LeMessurier Consultants is a Boston, Massachusetts firm, founded by William LeMessurier in 1961. It provides engineering support services to architects and construction firms. They focus on advanced structural techniques and impacts to construction materials. They are known for their modular construction techniques including the Mah-LeMessurier System for precast concrete in high-rise housing, the Staggered Truss System for high-rise steel structures, and the tuned mass damper used to reduce tall building motion. One of the best known uses of the damper is the John Hancock Tower in Boston. In addition to new construction, they also work with retrofitting buildings and historic preservation.
Dock Square in downtown Boston, Massachusetts, is a public square adjacent to Faneuil Hall, bounded by Congress Street, North Street, and the steps of the 60 State Street office tower. Its name derives from its original (17th-century) location at the waterfront. From the 1630s through the early 19th century, it served boats in the Boston Harbor as "the common landing place, at Bendell's Cove," later called Town Dock. "Around the dock was transacted the chief mercantile business of the town." After the waterfront was filled in during the early 19th century, Dock Square continued as a center of commerce for some years. The addition in the 1960s of Government Center changed the scale and character of the square from a hub of city life, to a place one merely passes through. As of the 1950s the square has become largely a tourist spot, with the Freedom Trail running through it. John Winthrop, coming from Salem where he landed as a Puritan from England, ended up "setting up a dock at the head of the cove, and here began the town of Boston, which soon was recognized as the political and economic center of the [Massachusetts Bay] colony.
Merchants Row in Boston, Massachusetts, is a short street extending from State Street to Faneuil Hall Square in the Financial District. Since the 17th century, it has been a place of commercial activity. It sits close to Long Wharf and Dock Square, hubs of shipping and trade through the 19th century. Portions of the street were formerly known as Swing-Bridge Lane, Fish Lane, and Roebuck Passage.
The Thatcher Magoun, an extreme clipper launched in 1855, was named after Medford's great shipbuilder, Thatcher Magoun, who died the year that she was launched.
James Otis Curtis was an American shipbuilder who built ships in Medford, Massachusetts. He built wooden ships that were either powered by sail or by screw and steam.
Paul Curtis was an American shipbuilder who built ships in Medford, Massachusetts.
Magoun Square station is a light rail station on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Green Line located at Lowell Street south of Magoun Square in Somerville, Massachusetts. The accessible station has a single island platform serving the two tracks of the Medford Branch. It opened on December 12, 2022, as part of the Green Line Extension (GLX), which added two northern branches to the Green Line, and is served by the E branch.
Anne Whitney created two public statues of Samuel Adams. One, made in 1876, resides in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the US Capitol, Washington, D.C. The other, made in 1880, is located in front of Faneuil Hall Plaza in Boston.
A Once and Future Shoreline is a permanent public artwork that graphically marks the edge of Boston Harbor, circa 1630, into the granite paving blocks of the plaza on the West side of the historic Faneuil Hall building. The 850-foot-long artwork depicts the location of a pre-colonial shoreline by graphically etching silhouettes of materials that are found typically along the high tide line. The artwork offers a way to engage the imagination in an exploration of the changes to this now urban site from a salty tidal marsh, to an active pedestrian plaza.
Thatcher Magoun was a shipbuilder who specialized in large ships and brigs, 250-tons and larger, built for the China trade. His reputation, according to the maritime historian Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, was "second to none among American shipbuilders." He was also called the "Father of Shipbuilding on the Mystic River."
The William Starkey was a 19th-century pilot boat built in 1854, by Benjamin F. Delano at the Thatcher Magoun shipyard for W. W. Goddard, of Boston. Starkey helped transport Boston maritime pilots between inbound or outbound ships coming into the Boston Harbor. She was named for Captain William Starkey, one of the founders of the Boston Marine Society. The Virginia Pilots' Association purchased the Boston schooner William Starkey in 1865, where she became a pioneer of the associations' fleet and the oldest pilot boat on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. In the age steam, she was sold in 1899 to Thomas Darling of Hampton, Virginia.