Of some consolation, however, is a series of interviews on architecture with local notables in the current issue of Boston Magazine in which the Hancock Tower is praised and the hands‐down choice as the city's ugliest building is a nearby skyscraper owned by and named for the Prudential Insurance Company. Mama Leone's, a nearby failed Italian restaurant, has gone into court charging that fear of falling glass deterred potential pasta lovers. Meanwhile, the Hancock company, the architects, various contractors and LibbeyOwens‐Ford, the glass supplier, are engaged in a series of pending multimillion‐dollar lawsuits over who will take the blame. The gunshot on Monday came several hours after Eastern Gas and Fuel Associates and its subsidiary, Boston Gas, canceled plans to lease three floors of the building, citing uncertainty. The police arrested a young cook living several blocks away. He appointed a five‐member panel to determine what should be done with the tower.Īs if things were not bad enough, last week a high powered rifle bullet shattered a window pane on the unoccupied 32d floor. Gens, the Boston Building Commissioner, was not reassured, however, and at the end of last month ordered a halt to further occupancies - 374 Hancock employees had been installed on three floors - until the company could assure him the building was safe.
Feeley noted that the new panes, unlike the old, pulverize into “relatively harmless small particles” rather than dangerous shards when they break.įrancis W. Perhaps a dozen other windows, he added, have been broken by vandals. Feeley, the John Hancock spokesman, says that seven of the new panes have broken because of what he terms “glass imperfections or construction difficulties.” He says that one of the broken panes remained in its frame and thus was diagnosed as flawed. John Hancock Center, 100-story mixed-use skyscraper, located at 875 North Michigan Avenue in Chicago and named after one of its early developers and tenants, the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co.
A new counterweightlike system called “tuned mass damper” was hung in the building at a cost of S3 million to reduce sway, and extra “stiffeners” were added. Bostonians, meanwhile, had begun to crow rather fond of the ugly duckling structure that loomed above the rest of the city's modest skyAs the reflecting glass curtain was completed, there was considerable admiration.īut all was still not smooth.
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