The John Hancock Tower, colloquially known as the Hancock, is a 60-story, 790-foot (240 m) skyscraper in the Back Bay neighborhood of downtown Boston, Massachusetts. The pinnacle height is 852-foot (260 m). Designed by Henry N. Cobb of the firm I. M. Pei & Partners, it was completed in 1976, and has held the title as the tallest building in New England ever since. In 2015, the lease belonging to the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company, for which the skyscraper was named, expired, and it was renamed to its address at 200 Clarendon Street.
Copp's Hill is an elevation in the historic North End of Boston, Massachusetts. It is bordered by Hull Street, Charter Street and Snow Hill Street. The hill takes its name from William Copp, a shoemaker who lived nearby. Copp's Hill Burying Ground is a stop on the Freedom Trail.
A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, in Edinburgh, tenements were developed with each apartment treated as a separate house, built on top of each other. Over hundreds of years, custom grew to become law concerning maintenance and repairs, as first formally discussed in Stair's 1681 writings on Scots property law. In Scotland, these are now governed by the Tenements Act, which replaced the old Law of the Tenement and created a new system of common ownership and procedures concerning repairs and maintenance of tenements. Tenements with one- or two-room flats provided popular rented accommodation for workers, but in some inner-city areas, overcrowding and maintenance problems led to shanty towns, which have been cleared and redeveloped. In more affluent areas, tenement flats form spacious privately owned houses, some with up to six bedrooms, which continue to be desirable properties.
The Granary Burying Ground in Massachusetts is the city of Boston's third-oldest cemetery, founded in 1660 and located on Tremont Street. It is the burial location of Revolutionary War-era patriots, including Paul Revere, the five victims of the Boston Massacre, and three signers of the Declaration of Independence: Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Robert Treat Paine. The cemetery has 2,345 grave-markers, but historians estimate that as many as 5,000 people are buried in it. The cemetery is adjacent to Park Street Church, behind the Boston Athenæum and immediately across from Suffolk University Law School. It is a site on Boston's Freedom Trail. The cemetery's Egyptian revival gate and fence were designed by architect Isaiah Rogers (1800–1869), who designed an identical gate for Newport's Touro Cemetery.
Bay Village is the smallest officially recognized neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. As of 2010, its population was approximately 1,312 residents living in 837 housing units, most of which are small brick rowhouses.
The Fairbanks House in Dedham, Massachusetts is a historic house built around 1641, making it the oldest surviving timber-frame house in North America that has been verified by dendrochronology testing. Puritan settler Jonathan Fairbanks constructed the farm house for his wife Grace and their family. It was occupied and passed down through eight generations of the family until the early 20th century. The original portion was expanded over several centuries, as architectural styles changed and the family grew.
The Sam Kee Building, also known as the Jack Chow Insurance Building, is a two-storey commercial building in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, located near the entrance to the city's Chinatown. It is noted for its narrow depth, which varies by floor. The ground floor is 4 feet 11 inches (1.50 m) wide, while the upper floor spans 6 feet (1.8 m) because of its overhanging bay windows. Additionally, a basement extends under the sidewalk adjacent to the storefront. This discrepancy has led to a dispute with the Skinny Building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, over which commercial building is more narrow, as the Skinny Building has a consistent depth of 5 feet 2 inches (1.57 m). Nonetheless, the Sam Kee Building is recognized by Guinness World Records as the narrowest commercial building in the world and by Ripley's Believe It or Not! as the world's thinnest building.
A spite house is a building constructed or substantially modified to irritate neighbors or any party with land stakes. Because long-term occupation is not the primary purpose of these houses, they frequently sport strange and impractical structures.
The Edward R. Hills House, also known as the Hills–DeCaro House, is a residence located at 313 Forest Avenue in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. It is most notable for a 1906 remodel by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in his signature Prairie style. The Hills–DeCaro House represents the melding of two distinct phases in Wright's career; it contains many elements of both the Prairie style and the designs with which Wright experimented throughout the 1890s. The house is listed as a contributing property to a federal historic district on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places and is a local Oak Park Landmark.
The Old Stone House is one of the oldest structures in Washington, D.C. The house is also the last pre-revolutionary colonial building in Washington, D.C. Built in 1765, Old Stone House is located at 3051 M Street, Northwest in the city's Georgetown neighborhood. Sentimental local folklore preserved the Old Stone House from being demolished, unlike many colonial homes in the area that were replaced by redevelopment.
The pie house, sometimes referred to as the Deerfield pie house or the Deerfield skinny house, is a two-story house located in Deerfield, Illinois, United States. It is located at 970 Chestnut Street, and is near the Deerfield Metra station. The beige-sided house was built to fit a narrow lot and has attracted attention due to its unusual shape. The house is not rectangular, but rather trapezoidal, and attained its primary nickname due to its resemblance to the shape of a slice of pie.
The Lucy Drexel Dahlgren House is a historic home located at 15 East 96th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues in Manhattan, New York City. It is on the border between the Carnegie Hill, Upper East Side, and East Harlem neighborhoods on the Upper East Side, within the Upper East Side Historic District. A private house used at one time as a convent, it was built in 1915–16 for Lucy Wharton Drexel Dahlgren. It is a New York City Landmark and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
75½ Bedford Street is a house located in the West Village neighborhood of New York City that is only 9 feet 6 inches wide. Built in 1873, it is often described as the narrowest house in New York. Its past tenants have included Edna St. Vincent Millay, author Ann McGovern, cartoonist William Steig and anthropologist Margaret Mead. It is sometimes referred to as the Millay House, indicated by a plaque on the outside of the house. The house is located in the Greenwich Village Historic District, but is not an individually designated New York City Landmark.
A Charleston single house is a form of house found in Charleston, South Carolina. A single house has its narrow side with a gable end along the street and a longer side running perpendicular to the street. The house is well-suited to long, narrow lots which were laid out in early Charleston. Despite the popularity of the story, single houses were not built to avoid taxes that were, according to the tales, based on the width of the house; no evidence supports anything about such fanciful myths.
The Skinny House in Mamaroneck, New York, was built in 1932 by African-American carpenter and building contractor Nathan Thomas Seely on an extremely narrow lot of donated land after he lost his home to foreclosure and his company to bankruptcy during the early years of the Great Depression. The 10 feet (3.0 m) wide house has 3 stories and was built on a 12.5 feet (3.8 m) wide plot of land sold to him by his neighbor, to whom he had earlier sold a larger plot of land. The house was constructed entirely from salvaged materials. The New York State Board for Historic Preservation noted “its efficient and beautiful design, careful engineering, and effective interior plan. Challenged by a narrow lot and minimal financial means, Seely created a house that demonstrated both his ingenuity and the desire to provide, above all else, housing for his family.” The Westchester County Historical Society said “its professional construction and ingenious design are a testimony to the dedication of a prominent black contractor to build a solid, functional, and delightful home. It represents both black enterprise and good neighborliness, and is architecturally significant as a symbol of American ingenuity and craftsmanship.”
Mathew H. Ritchey House, also known as Mansion House and Belle Starr House, is a historic home located in Newtonia, Newton County, Missouri. It was built about 1840, and is a two-story, brick dwelling with a two-story rear wing built using slave labor. The house rests on a sandstone block foundation and has a side-gabled roof. It features a one-story front portico and interior end chimneys. Also on the property is the contributing Ritchey family cemetery, outbuildings, and a well. During the American Civil War, the site saw fighting during both the First and Second Battles of Newtonia, which required its use as a hospital after the battles. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and is a contributing property in the First Battle of Newtonia Historic District. The building was damaged by a tornado in 2008.
The Hendel Building, more commonly known as the Skinny Building, is a commercial building in Downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At only 5 feet 2 inches (1.57 m) wide, it is one of the narrowest commercial buildings in the world, rivaling the Sam Kee Building in Vancouver which is considered the narrowest by Guinness World Records. The Kee building is 4 feet 11 inches (1.50 m) wide at the ground floor, but has overhanging bay windows on the second floor that extend to 6 feet (1.8 m). The Skinny Building's narrow lot was created in 1903 by a street widening project, and the building itself was constructed in 1926 by Louis Hendel, partly out of spite for neighboring business owners who complained about him obstructing the sidewalk with his fruit-selling business. Due to the building's impractical dimensions, the second and third floors have not seen much use, but the ground floor has housed a number of different businesses including a popular lunch counter. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing property in the Fourth Avenue Historic District.
The Home for the Aged Men and Women also sometimes known as the Home for the Aged, Poor and Infants was a charitable organization located on H Street NE, between 2nd Street NE and 3rd Street NE, next to the train line running down I Street NE, in Washington, D.C. This was a working-class neighborhood next to Swampoodle. It was organized and managed by the Little Sisters of the Poor and provided housing, food and care for elderly men and women who had no relatives to take care of them, regardless of religion or race. The Sisters would beg for their needs as well as for those of their residents as prescribed by their order. It opened on March 19, 1873, and expending for the rest of the 19th century. It became a place of life for many older destitute individuals with the yearly distraction of the high society of diplomats and socialites of Washington, D.C., visiting the home on Saint Joseph's Day. I survived the 1968 riots but was a victim of the 1970s urban movement focused on freeways and cars. Today, it is a luxury apartment complex off of H Street and its many restaurants and bars.
The Hollensbury Spite House is a spite house located at 523 Queen Street in Alexandria, Virginia. The narrow building measures 7-feet 6-inches wide and is often called the skinniest house in the United States. The house has drawn international attention, being covered by numerous news outlets, and was once featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. It is frequently visited by tourists who often pose in front of the building and is also included on local history tours. The house is 350 square-feet but also includes an outdoor patio and garden, providing additional entertaining space. Because of its narrow front door and small interior space, the house is decorated with smaller furniture pieces and antiques.
The Preble Box Toe Company explosion occurred on November 8, 1928, at the company's factory in Lynn, Massachusetts. Eleven people died in the blast and resulting fires and another nine later died from their injuries, making it the deadliest explosion to occur in Greater Boston.
