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Berkeley Building

1940s architecture in the United States1947 establishments in MassachusettsArt Deco architecture in MassachusettsBack Bay, BostonOffice buildings completed in 1947
Ralph Adams Cram buildingsSkyscraper office buildings in Boston
John Hancock Tower, 200 Berkeley
John Hancock Tower, 200 Berkeley

The Berkeley Building (also known as the Old John Hancock Building) is a 26-story, 495-foot (151 m) building located at 200 Berkeley Street, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. It is the second of the three John Hancock buildings built in Boston; it was succeeded by the John Hancock Tower. The building is known for the weather beacon at its summit, which displays distinctive light patterns as weather forecasts. The Berkeley Building is the 20th-tallest building in the city.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Berkeley Building (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Berkeley Building
Berkeley Street, Boston Back Bay

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Wikipedia: Berkeley BuildingContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 42.349938888889 ° E -71.072652777778 °
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Address

The Berkeley Building (Old John Hancock Building)

Berkeley Street 200
02116 Boston, Back Bay
Massachusetts, United States
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John Hancock Tower, 200 Berkeley
John Hancock Tower, 200 Berkeley
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Nearby Places

Youth's Companion Building
Youth's Companion Building

The Youth's Companion Building is a historic building at 209 Columbus Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts. The building is also known as the Pledge of Allegiance Building because the Pledge of Allegiance was written and published there. The building originally had the address 201 Columbus Avenue and also has the address 142 Berkeley Street. It was built in 1892 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. It housed the offices of The Youth's Companion, the magazine owned and edited by Daniel Ford that promoted the Pledge of Allegiance. Ford built the building for The Youth's Companion and moved the magazine's headquarters there in 1892, where it remained until 1915, when the magazine moved to a new building near the current Boston University. Ford's monumental, five-story building combined beauty and artistic qualities with good design and lay out for a publishing business, with natural light from windows and skylights. His style was the round-arched, squat-columned, masonry-exalting Romanesque. This five-storied building Richardson designed for The Companion is of brown sandstone and matching brick, as solid and impressive as a bank. Great arched windows and heavily recessed and arched doors characterize the street facade. Passing beneath the great arch, one enters a great vestibule two stories high. Throughout the interior the woodwork was of oak with heavily carved oaken benches for waiting visitors. The architects, Henry W. Hartwell and William Cummings Richardson, also designed a number of other buildings in the Boston area, notably the Belmont Town Hall and Christ Church, Andover. When used by The Youth's Companion, the first floor of the building held the business office, correspondence department, subscription and advertising departments with Ford's office in the back. The third floor held the premium department, packing and mailing room, and stitching machines. The fifth floor contained the editorial offices, art department and library that had an encyclopedic collection of clippings from over 200 magazines from around the world. The press room was in the basement along with the presses, collators, steam tubular boilers for power binding equipment and two dynamos which generated electricity for lighting.

101 Clarendon Street

101 Clarendon Street, also known as Columbus Center, was a proposed skyscraper planned for Boston, Massachusetts. If completed, it would have stood as the 25th-tallest building in Boston. Continuing on the trend established by the Prudential Tower in 1964, the completed building would have concealed more of the Massachusetts Turnpike (I-90) by utilizing air rights above it. The location would have been above the turnpike, directly to the east of Back Bay station and south of Copley Square in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston. The project would have "united the city’s Back Bay and South End neighborhoods."The project was put on what was then a temporary hiatus in March 2008 with the developers citing a need for about $35 million in state funds and loans, some of which had been denied ironically because construction had stopped.In 2010, the main financial investor in Columbus Center, the California Pension and Retirement System (CalPERS), began to extricate itself from the development. Citing the economic unfeasibility of such a project and the intransigence of locals opposing the project, the $800 million complex was eventually declared defunct by CalPERS and investor Arthur Winn. Debates over the final cost of cleaning up the proposed site (estimated at $5–6 million) continue.Winn was later charged with making illegal campaign contributions totaling $61,000 over the course of eight years in an attempt to win approval and support for the Columbus Center project. He pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of donating in another person's name to U.S. Representatives Stephen Lynch and Mike Capuano.As of 2016 there are two developers in favor of reviving the project.

John Hancock Tower
John Hancock Tower

200 Clarendon Street, previously John Hancock Tower and colloquially known as The Hancock, is a 62-story, 790-foot (240 m) skyscraper in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston. It is the tallest building in New England. The tower was designed by Henry N. Cobb of the firm I. M. Pei & Partners and was completed in 1976.The building is widely known for its prominent structural flaws, including an analysis that the entire building could overturn under certain wind loads—as well as a prominent design failure of its signature blue windows, which allowed any of the 500-lb. window panes to detach and fall—up to the full height of the building—endangering pedestrians below. In 1977, the American Institute of Architects presented the firm with a National Honor Award for the building, and in 2011 conferred on it the Twenty-five Year Award. It has been the tallest building in Boston and New England since 1976. The street address is 200 Clarendon Street, but occupants also use "Hancock Place" as a mailing address for offices in the building. John Hancock Insurance was the primary tenant of the building at opening, but the company announced in 2004 that some offices would relocate to a new building at 601 Congress Street, in Fort Point, Boston. The tower was originally named for the insurance company that occupied it. The insurance company, in turn, was named for John Hancock, whose large and conspicuous signature on the Declaration of Independence made his name so famous in the United States that a colloquialism for a signature is "a John Hancock".