CultureNOW - Hancock Tower (near Trinity Church): Peter Vanderwarker

Hancock Tower (near Trinity Church)

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Description

Like a wise and serene old person, Trinity Church has witnessed many changes in the world it inhabits, none more extraordinary than the replacement of the late-Victorian Westminster Hotel by the late-modem Hancock Tower. Trinity, the landmark designed by H. H. Richardson, the most notable architect ever to work out of Boston, is the
building on the left in both photographs. The older photo was made in 1961 by Irene Shwachman of Needham. It shows the underside of the Westminster Hotel's octagonal comer bay, richly endowed with decoration conceived in kitsch and executed in terra-cotta by the sculptor Max Bachman.

The remarkably lifeless, rather pre-Raphaelite angels, looking like drugged teenagers, hover above a figure of Neptune that is holding hands with an unseen lady friend around the comer. Beneath Neptune is the end of an inelegantly lettered Latin slogan, ".. . virtus non stemma character," which probably means something like, "Character is worth more than a pedigree." For all the richness of surface, humanity, and charm, you can't avoid the sense here of a decorative tradition that has reached its dead end, of an artist merely going through the motions one more time.

Completed in 1903, the Westminster was demolished in the 1960s and eventually replaced by the Hancock Tower, designed by Henry Cobb of I. M. Pei & Partners and completed in 1975. The Hancock's minimalism is the ultimate contrast to the Westminster's kitsch. Swept away by the clean broom of modernism are the clutter and confusion but also the humanity and visual interest of the Westminster, replaced by a blank, aloof, abstract elegance. The story of the Westminster and the Hancock is one of
the great ironies of Boston's architectural history because the Westminster was the subject of a notable legal action concerning its height. When built, it was discovered to exceed the height limit of 90 feet that the Legislature had established in .1898 for all buildings fronting Copley Square.

The city sued the owners, and in 1903, the US Supreme Court ruled against the Westminster in a decision that helped establish the right of governments to regulate the heights of buildings. The Westminster's owners had to chop off the top six feet of their building, leaving it in a visibly shorn state until its demolition and replacement by the Hancock Tower, which is exactly 700 feet taller. Between those two symbolic events - the chopping off of the Westminster in 1903 and the topping off of the Hancock in 1975 - there occurred, surely, a loss of consensus or else a loss of nerve among Bostonians in addressing the question of what our city should look like.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Put your John Hancock Here", Boston Globe, 10 June 1984

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Location

Stuart St & Clarendon St
Boston, MA 02116
United States

Nearby Items

John Hancock Tower		308 feet
St. James Avenue at Claredon Street		641 feet
Trinity Church		801 feet
Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel		890 feet
Berkeley Building		902 feet
A. Philip Randolph		911 feet
Farewell to Steam		911 feet